Arthur Morgan (Louth, Sinn Fein)

I am doing that. However, I must point this out to contextualise it. Otherwise, people will not understand what we are talking about, which would be unfortunate - not new, but unfortunate.

Amendment No. 16 is linked to amendment No. 85. What we need to do in this regard is deal with the issue of long-term economic value. I had to try to define this nonsense of long-term economic value because I was pestered about it last Friday afternoon when I tried to walk up the street in Dundalk. People stop me for all sorts of reasons but this instance was unusual because three people referred to this carry-on about long-term economic value. They did not call it long-term economic value because they are perhaps not sure of the term and cannot recall it all the time, but they certainly know what the concept is. A number of people made the point that it is as if somebody came to buy my car, which was priced at €3,000, but the person offered to give me €4,000. As one person said, " I am still waiting for the Government to buy a car off me for the extra money."

The ordinary people have a fair grasp of what is going on in terms of this long-term economic value. It is about the Government, through NAMA and the master SPV - the daddy SPV with all the babies in tow - giving these speculators who were caught out by their sheer greed a value for their investments way above what they are worth. This is why the issue of current market value is important - it refers to the market value of here and now. There is always a market value. It might be 5 cent but there is a market value, and that is what it should be. We are told we cannot do this, that or the other, and that we have to work with the market. Then all of this economic turmoil happens, and guess what? The market value is not really that important after all, and we can set it aside and introduce this new concept of long-term economic value. I looked for a definition of long-term economic value but I could not find it. Perhaps we can get some help with that later.

One of the ways of looking at the market value concept emerged in the High Court and Supreme Court when the banks moved against the Carroll-Zoe group. Documents submitted to the High Court and Supreme Court, and accepted by both, placed the value of the properties of that group of companies at approximately 20% to 25% of their bubble value. That gives us an indication of the current market value about which we are talking when dealing with these toxic NAMA loans. Yet, the Government has decided it will pay €47 billion for them.

Just in case that is not enough, let us give it a top-up of another €7 billion. I can understand why the public are exasperated at the concept of long-term economic value and the bail out for the bankers and the speculators. Make no mistake about it, that is what this is all about. The Government keeps telling us that this is not a bail out for the bankers and the speculators, but of course it is. All that money is being shovelled into the banks, even though many of the senior executives in those banks demonstrated themselves to be significantly less than trustworthy. It also provides for the whole notion of working with developers to finish off their enterprises, even though they over-reached and got caught out. Is it any wonder that market value versus long-term economic value is of the utmost importance in this Bill? Along with four or five others, it is one of the sections in the Bill that exposes the absolute lunacy of this NAMA enterprise.

The whole thing was turned into farce when we heard about the SPV, which will make sure that NAMA will not be properly accountable to this House in the first place. It is important the Government provides an explanation as to why it is dealing with long-term economic value, instead of dealing properly with the concept of current market value. That is where we should be.

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