Brian Lenihan Jnr (Dublin West, Fianna Fail)

It is a matter for all of us to agree as to whether it should be a sub-committee of the Oireachtas Committee on Finance and the Public Service or a full committee of the House. I have an open mind on that and I am open to persuasion. What I agree to in principle is that a committee or a sub-committee should be established to scrutinise NAMA. I propose to contact the Chief Whip in the coming days to prepare an Oireachtas resolution to provide for the establishment of the committee or sub-committee and the specific detail on the terms of reference. Opposition parties will be consulted in the usual way as part of this process and any such resolution must be presented to the House for approval. That is the way we set up a parliamentary committee.

I have also accepted the amendments that the reports should be issued quarterly. We considered the vast information in that regard and the committee will have plenty of material to work on from a quarterly report. We also discussed on Committee Stage when the first quarterly report would arise, which will be in late March 2010. In addition, Deputy Burton expressed the specific concern that an amount of the work in terms of the issue of the bonds will take place before 31 March next. Initially, I explored with her the concept of a process order, but I never indicated that the process order would be entrenched in legislation. However, when I raised the possibility of the process order, I found she was unconvinced of the merits of this approach.

I then pointed out on Committee Stage that the regulator would have a specific role with regard to the validation of the issue of the securities in the context of our obligations to the European Union. I felt the regulator would be an appropriate person to report to the Oireachtas on that matter also, so that there would be greater scrutiny by any committee we established of the issue of the relevant bonds. I indicated I was open to that and do not have difficulty with such scrutiny.

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