Mr. Brendan McDonagh:

We already have a number of licence agreements in which we have done exactly as the Deputy describes. Debtors or receivers had land under their control and had licensing arrangements with people. Where smaller builders were not paid the full amount up front, they would pay a site fine every time a house was built and a certain amount of the proceeds would come back. That has worked and it certainly was under consideration.

It is important to consider that a number of debtors who took that considerable land bank paid their full debt to the taxpayer. It was like having a mortgage on a house and if a person pays that mortgage, it belongs to that person and he or she can do whatever they want.

They would have brought a considerable land bank with them when they paid off their debt to NAMA. Some land bank would have gone on loan sales, whereby we sold a number of packages to a number of debtors. We sold their loans and they bought the security for those mortgages with it.

We have all constantly looked at the portfolio to determine the maximum we could deliver from it. The reality was that when looking at our land bank, there was no real interest, by and large, expressed in it by approved housing bodies or local authorities. They bought bits and pieces here and there across the portfolio but what they were interested in was completed units. We offered up 7,000 completed or soon-to-be-completed units but, as I said, just over 2,600 were taken up. We certainly gave this a lot of consideration.