Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

At the time, the Taoiseach said that a commission of investigation would be set up if required. This is meant to be a discussion about the terms of reference of the commission of investigation but the Chairman of the Committee of Public Accounts has said he is due to report in a while. I do not have a problem with it happening provided the terms are identified clearly and that it will not be a commission that will go on for years, possibly a decade, and cost Irish taxpayers more millions in lawyers' fees. I want to see something focused and directed that will provide answers to those reasonable questions that can be established.

Some of what has happened in NAMA, particularly in respect of valuations, is a question of opinion. I do not honestly think that there will ever be a report that will be able to reconcile the understandable views and case made by the Comptroller and Auditor General for his estimate of how the valuations should have been approached and NAMA's position as a bad bank for Ireland and how it approached them. There are two completely different opinions in respect of those valuations. Members might see a way in which a commission of investigation will be able to give more information than is contained in the statements of the two parties, both of them calculated on a particular basis and based on particular assumptions at a historic moment in time, but I have not yet seen it and I do not know how it is going to be done. A commission of investigation will take the statements of the different parties and probably weigh them in the balance depending on the assumptions it has made.

The proposal by the Chairman of the Committee of Public Accounts should be accepted. I am totally open to there being a commission of investigation but I honestly think that today's discussion is premature until those various reports are put into the public domain and people can analyse what those reports have to say, which could then inform a better structured commission of investigation which would get the kind of answers people want.

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