Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

-----and his opinions on the matter, then perhaps he should look to speak to the Committee of Public Accounts, either in private or in public. It is the committee that deals with NAMA.

As Deputy Wallace is aware, NAMA was set up under fairly extraordinary legislation following a series of through-the-night meetings in this Chamber when it was established by the late Brian Lenihan, the then Minister for Finance. It was specifically structured - I am saying this to Sinn Féin Members as well - so that politicians would not be involved actively in any way in the management. More than almost any other structure, when it comes to legislation that this Dáil has passed, any active involvement, even at ministerial level, was actually precluded from the structure, such was the sensitivity of the case and the desire of the late Brian Lenihan, the then Minister for Finance, to avoid any direct involvement of politicians, office-holders or others in the affairs of NAMA.

I was the Labour Party finance spokesperson in the Dáil at the time. While I disagreed with the then Minister on many issues about NAMA - I see other people who were there at the time - I actually agreed that it was quite important that serving politicians were not involved in the business of NAMA. That was the structure put in place by the Dáil to avoid the situation that arose previously, leading up to the crash, when there had been an unhealthy and close connection between some politicians and the housing and development market and, perhaps, with banking institutions and all of that. We still have to hear from the banking inquiry, but I imagine it is the view of many people that many of those connections were unhealthily close. They led to bad decision-making and very bad outcomes, as Deputy Wallace has just said, for Irish taxpayers, something about which we are all extremely concerned.

I strongly suggest to Deputy Wallace that, if he has information, he should make that information available to the authorities and the committee in Northern Ireland investigating the matter. In respect of NAMA, Deputy Wallace clearly has a list of significant questions he wants to put to the agency. I strongly suggest that he uses the mechanism of the Committee of Public Accounts and the other committees of this House to progress his questions.

See this speech in context