Ruth Coppinger (Dublin West, Anti-Austerity Alliance) | Oireachtas source

This is a very important discussion because the issue of NAMA is on the list of practically everybody outside this building. I have to refer to the totally self-serving contribution we have just heard from Deputy Burton. She tried to make all sorts of excuses as to why a commission is not needed. She complained that lawyers might get rich; in that case, we should cap their fees and take action to see that they do not.

She also tried to excuse her own role as a key Minister, the Tánaiste, in the previous Government by saying that NAMA was a fait accompliwhen her party came into government. It was set up by the previous Government, but unfortunately the Labour Party made no attempt to step in on behalf of the common good and particularly on behalf of the people devastated by the housing crisis in recent years when NAMA played a key role in hoarding land and accelerating the housing crisis. It has hoarded buildings that it has sold off in a glut of sales, including to vulture funds, as we have seen in recent times. The previous contribution was all about trying to excuse the Labour Party's complete inactivity.

Obviously, there is a need for an investigation into Project Eagle. According to the Comptroller and Auditor General, NAMA incurred a potential loss to the taxpayer of €223 million on the sale of a portfolio of all its remaining 860 Northern Ireland loans to Cerberus in April 2014. Other ways of calculating that would give a much bigger loss. NAMA paid €2.35 billion for the loans and according to The Irish Timessold them at a potential loss of 13%. According to another article in The Irish Times, the original book value of the Project Eagle loans was over €6 billion, so the true loss was €4.5 billion and not €223 million. Obviously, there are many conflicts of interest that have been well documented and reported, relating to Frank Cushnahan and others.

I wish to highlight some other things that should be investigated regarding NAMA. I do not advocate that they should be done in this investigation but should be done at some point. After initially hoarding land and property to help engineer a shortage of both and drive up prices, contributing directly to the current housing emergency, NAMA then decided to flog off as fast as possible huge portfolios of loans to vulture funds as we now see today. We were told they were the only ones with the money to buy billions of euro worth of property in one go. NAMA has sold off so many loans in the past two years alone that it has relatively little of its original portfolio left.

Last year, Ireland was the top European location for distressed loan sales for the fourth year in a row, all because of NAMA and the decision taken by the Fine Gael Party, and previously by the Fianna Fáil and Labour parties, to pursue this policy. It is absolutely outrageous and history will condemn all the parties that contributed to it.

The majority of NAMA's vast land portfolio has now been sold and we have a housing emergency. It is an incredible situation, as I am sure many could testify. In my constituency, NAMA is building luxury-end housing estates and mansions in Castleknock. Meanwhile, we have a homeless black spot in Dublin West. That is the contrast and how the NAMA policy is felt on the ground.

The second aspect worthy of investigation is the unconditional sale of completed residential properties to vulture funds and corporate landlords with no respect for tenants' rights or the way that rents rose after NAMA sold them off. It seems to have shown absolutely no regard in the process.

A third aspect of NAMA's dealings relates to the thousands of business loans on hotels, offices, shops and, as we found out last week, even a refugee hostel operating a State contract that have been sold by NAMA to vulture funds with no regard to what might happen to the 12 workers in Limerick or to the 64 men who lived there and have now been displaced.

Another aspect is the great tax robbery that NAMA has facilitated. Despite owning billions of euro in assets, the average vulture fund pays only €250 a year in tax. Nobody really knows how much has been lost already, but estimates range from about €1 billion to €2 billion a year over recent years. Under pressure, the Minister for Finance, Deputy Noonan, belatedly moved to close down some of the get-out clauses of which he and his Department had been aware for years, and which they used as carrots to attract these vulture funds to Ireland. The biggest carrot has yet to come, in the form of a complete exemption from CGT that the Minister has given to vulture funds that bought property from 2012 to 2014 and hold on to it for seven years. We must brace ourselves for another tax robbery from 2019 onwards when the vultures come home to roost and sell that off.

A further aspect of NAMA that deserves to be investigated is the writing off of €40 billion in debt, owned by Ireland's richest men - they are usually men - by the time NAMA winds up, sometimes while leaving them in control of their property empire. Figures provided to the Dáil last week show the scale of debt write-off for the richest people in Ireland at the same time as ordinary owner-occupier mortgage holders and others are being hounded from their homes. According to the Minister, by the end of 2016, a total of 505 debtors who originally owed €27.3 billion have now been allowed to exit NAMA, having repaid only €14.9 billion in debt. In other words, these 505 debtors have paid an average of €24.5 million, but more than that in individual cases. There has been huge debt forgiveness for these people.

Last week, the Minister also casually asserted it was never envisaged that NAMA would collect all the money owed. That is completely and utterly incorrect. When NAMA was established by the then Minister, the late Brian Lenihan, he made it perfectly clear it was not to be a vehicle for developers to write down debt and get off scot free. Obviously, that is not the case.

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