Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
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I appreciate the witnesses' attendance at the committee. I want to return to the issues that have been touched on by my two colleagues. The one thing we should never say when talking about the banking collapse, NAMA and the losses that resulted in huge austerity, and perhaps the witnesses did not mean in this way, is that we are all to blame or everyone is to blame, which I think were the words used. Not everyone is to blame. It was bankers, speculators and policy decisions at the time that were to blame, for that and for the suffering ordinary Irish people went through as a result of that.

My question was that, when the loans were transferred to NAMA, which concluded in 2011, what was the job of NAMA? Let me just start from a point. It is rubbish to suggest NAMA made a profit. NAMA made a spectacular loss. I am not personalising this to the witnesses, because this is being done by the Government and Ministers, including Ministers in Fine Gael who were opposed to the NAMA set-up in the first place, but it is insulting to the intelligence of the Irish public to suggest that a €40 billion loss is somehow a €5 billion profit. It is hurtful. It is not right. NAMA's job, was it not, was to recover as much of the €74 billion in loans it was given at that time. Was that not the job that it had?