Michael D Higgins (Galway West, Labour)

I wish to make a few small points about this amendment. I deeply regret that we are not taking amendments Nos. 16 and 82 to 87, inclusive, together. Amendment No. 16, which has been proposed by Deputy Morgan, inserts a definition of market value into section 4. Amendments Nos. 82 to 87 relate to section 70. The difficulty with the Bill as drafted is that section 4 regularly refers onwards to sections that follow and, equally, section 70 refers back to section 4.

Deputy Morgan wishes to place his amendment in section 4 between lines 21 and 22 on page 20. In the course of that section several references are made to valuation. For example, on page 21, line 38 the terms "valuation methodology" is defined as "the valuation methodology set out in Part 5.". There are definitions set in Part 5, section. Section 70(2)(a) states that in this Part "a reference to the market value for property is a reference to the estimated amount that would be paid by a willing buyer to a willing seller in an arm's-length transaction after proper marketing (where appropriate) where both parties act knowledgeably, prudently and without compulsion". The difficulty arises when this definition of market value is applied in section 70(2)(b) in regard to a bank asset in the same way as I have outlined for the market value for property.

All that might be fine in a way, but it is very difficult not to get the impression from this that the valuation methodology is an exercise in abstraction. I made a point on Committee Stage that the usual understanding of market value, for example, which is the term used in Deputy Morgan's amendment, includes an estimation of future economic value. We have had a useful distinction between what Deputy Bruton has said and what Deputy Morgan said in moving his amendment. The former drew a distinction between what the market would yield at any particular time and an estimation of the market, putting different conditions in place. The difficulty about this is that one might ask why we have Part 5, section 70. It is difficult not to conclude that the reason we do not have clear, explicit definitions in section 4, an issue to which Deputy Morgan's amendment is addressed, is because of the unusual usage of the term "long-term economic value".

The Minister suggests it is coming into popular usage in the United States and is already in use generally in Europe. I respectfully repeat what I said on Committee Stage - this is not so. Market value has a connotation of an estimate of what is the fundamental value of the asset.

There are difficulties in section 4 that go beyond this and I wish the Minister was here to clarify these. There is even difficulty with the definition of an asset. We can discuss it when discussing the section, if we even get that far. My concern relates to what is securing a loan that is linked to an asset and whether that asset can be anything, for example, a piece of art, which would at least be tangible to a certain degree, or-----

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