Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for raising this matter. He has done so in a very helpful manner. I do not believe there is anybody in the House who is not interested in hearing some of the responses to allegations that have been thrown around.

I am conscious that the Deputy's colleague, Deputy John McGuinness, is leading an all-party Committee of Public Accounts inquiry committee in regard to the position and that both Brendan McDonagh, CEO of NAMA, and Chairman Frank Daly, have been speaking very frankly for an extended period to the members of the committee. Those members are acting on behalf of the Oireachtas in pursuit of appropriate, straight and honest answers to questions that have been raised.

We need to be very clear about what happened and what the mood in the country was at the time when NAMA was established. The Labour Party did not support the establishment of NAMA. We saw flaws in the set-up and expressed our reservations at the time. Two underlining principles were put forward regarding the establishment of NAMA and as far as I am aware, all of the parties in the House at the time and the Independent Members agreed with them. The first principle cuts to the heart of some of the current soreness, including of complaints we hear in this House. This principle was that developers - this was the will of the people - would not be allowed to buy back their loans at heavily discounted prices through the back door. Some people in this House who were themselves successful developers unfortunately lost out. Everybody in the House was involved in the debate. Deputy Michael McGrath was heavily involved in the discussions as a backbench contributor to the debates and the late Deputy Brian Lenihan, as Minister for Finance, led at the time for the Government. Developers were not going to be offered a back door through which to buy back their loans.

The second principle, on which everybody in the House agreed, and I presume still agree, was that politicians would not be directly involved with NAMA. This was for all the reasons we know, which I will not go into, in the history of the bubble and its development, of overly close connections between some political parties, developers and banks.

I am not going to go into that. We have all seen the different reports, such as the Nyberg report. Politicians were not going to be involved in the detailed line decisions on NAMA. When NAMA was established, the Committee of Public Accounts was given an overriding authority on behalf of everybody here to be the investigating body to which NAMA could be properly and fully accountable. I agree with the Deputy on this.

I have listed to Members in this House who are former developers. I have great sympathy for some of the misfortunes that befell them. I have heard them say, with great passion, that at the height of the bubble property values were, say, €6 billion or €7 billion and when the crash came, unfortunately those values often fell below a billion. In fact, when I watched him on television for a short while this morning, I heard Mr. Daly say that in many cases, loan values fell by 50%. In some cases, he said, the loan values fell to below 10%.

What we are getting is a terrible regret on the part of developers that they did not get to buy their loans by the back door and a wish that the bubble values, which they want to keep in front of our eyes as the amounts that should have been realised and magicked up by NAMA, would actually represent what business would pay for them. That, of course, has not happened. We have had Deputy Wallace raise this time after time, as a man who has worked hard in development and produced good developments all his working life. Of course he, like other developers, had a terrible fall in terms of his business. We all sympathise with this, across the House. However, the argument that people should be allowed to buy back their loans was a critical issue in the period around the establishment of NAMA and that is what is in the legislation. I think it was Fianna Fáil that sponsored this legislation. That is why there has to be an arm's-length process of selling.

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