Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

It has no experience in the property game or in housing. There is no one on the board with any experience in this area. Between late 2016 and the first five months of 2017, 91 of NAMA's staff have left. Anyone who is any good is getting out of the place because its name is muck now and they do not want anything to do with it.

I will outline part of the problem. Tallaght Cross West went sale agreed in January 2016. NAMA sold the 442 apartments of the development to I-RES REIT. They worked out at about €100,000 each, whereas the average new house in Dublin today costs €460,000. The full price of the sale was €83 million. There was €40 million worth of commercial property and €42 million worth of residential property in the sale. What are these fellas doing with it? They are probably renting them and they will sell them for a bomb when they feel like it. Honeypark in Dún Laoghaire started in 2013. It comprises 800 units. Cosgrave is building it and NAMA is funding it. In December 2015, NAMA sold 180 of the units to a fund called Mercury at €360,000 per unit. What did Mercury do with the units? They were presold, built and rented. They never even saw the market. Why would they? NAMA - the State - is coming up with money to build out projects, and what does it do with them? It sells them to the vulture funds. What a great idea. That will really solve the housing crisis. I put out a press statement last Friday about a site on Castleforbes Road in the Docklands, the Northbank apartment block. There are 46 empty apartments in the development and NAMA has them. NAMA has just bought seven it did not already control. There are 124 apartments in the whole development. It bought the last seven so it could control the whole development and put it on the market to get a vulture fund to buy it. Why would we want to give apartments to vulture funds when we have a housing crisis? Will anyone in the Government ask NAMA why there were 46 empty units in that complex? Some of them have been empty for three years. This is nonsense. Does the Government want to fix the housing crisis? One would be unwell just thinking about it. It breaks my heart.

The Minister, Deputy Coveney, established last year that we can build a three-bed house in Dublin for just over €200,000 because we have our own land, we can supply the house and, obviously, we can get away without the levies, the planning contributions. The State could therefore supply three-bed housing in Dublin for somewhere in the region of €205,000 back in December; let us call it €230,000 now. Why would we want NAMA building houses which it will sell for about €400,000 with State land? What is the clever plan there? I do not understand it very well. I do not see much logic in it. I would love to know where the rationality comes in. It is madness. I get the impression from the budget that the Government thinks that things are great now and that the economy is rising. It is improving by about 5% a year. Things are pretty good for perhaps about 50% of the population. That may be a bit of an exaggeration. Perhaps it is somewhere between 40% and 50%. I swear to God, there is a rising level of inequality in this country that I have not seen in my lifetime. I am over 60 years of age. I have never seen the level of inequality we have today. We are going down the tubes. I am not a pessimist; I am an optimist. However, we are not running the country in a fair way. Why do we not do it? Why do we not run the country properly? I do not understand it.

In September 2016, the Minister, Deputy Coveney, announced a local infrastructure housing activation fund, with the intention of addressing affordability. It was abandoned in March 2017. A total of €226 million was given for infrastructure for sites, but there was no agreement to provide affordable housing, which was the plan in the first place. Government policy is driving up the price of housing and rents. I see the Government is now introducing a measure to address capital gains tax, that it will bring it back to four years. The Government is retrofitting a big screw-up on the part of the previous Minister for Finance when he brought in a system that encouraged the REITs to come in and buy up all the distressed property for peanuts from NAMA and the banks and get a cartel controlling influence over the rental market in Dublin. That is what they have today - the REITs: I-RES REIT, Hibernia REIT and God knows what next. We now have huge foreign money controlling our rental market. Is that a good idea? The Government wants to get rid of the amateur fella who only has one or two properties, but we cannot afford professional landlords. The latter are boasting about the fact that they can now get €2,200 a month for a two-bed and up to €2,800 for a three-bed. They are saying the prospects look good for the next couple of years and it is going up, not down, because we do not do anything about managing it. It is the Government's responsibility to manage but it is not managing.

To go back to NAMA for a minute, there is so much conflict of interest in how it operates. There are four-bed units in the development in Dún Laoghaire to which I referred. They are selling for €700,000. We are organising State money to build houses to give to developers to build and sell for €700,000 when we could be using that land to provide not just social housing, but affordable private housing as well. We are not doing it.

Connor Owens was hired by NAMA in June 2012 and became deputy head of asset recovery in October 2014. Prior to his appointment, NAMA's Conor Owens was a founding director in May 2010 of a property company called Core Asset Management. It was established specifically with the backing of some American money, with the aim to purchase distressed properties from NAMA and from struggling investors and developers in Ireland. After starting Core Asset Management, he appointed Bill Nowlan of WK Nowlan & Associates, an adviser to NAMA, as a director and core shareholder of Core Asset Management in August 2010. Bill Nowlan would go on to serve as a director of Core until November 2013 and had shares in it until 2014. He was giving NAMA advice, and these guys were controlling funds that were buying property. Why does no one care that NAMA is ridden with conflict of interest? Honestly, I will be tempted to leave the country if the Government gives it a role in trying to solve the housing crisis. The Government might say "good riddance" and do it to try to get rid of me. It is crony capitalism.

It is going against the whole notion of what capitalism was. Let us pretend that we like it. It is actually breaking the rules of capitalism given what is going on and how we are allowing NAMA to operate. It is 100% crony capitalism but we do not have a Government that is prepared to shout "Stop". We did not even seem to have a problem with the fact the National Crime Agency in Britain was investigating this, that there are currently eight suspects under investigation, and that the US Securities and Exchange Commission is still looking at it. Mr. Justice Cooke is supposed to be getting an investigation off the ground here soon, yet we are looking at giving those fellows more responsibility after they made an absolute hames of our housing problems. They are a huge part of the problem. If I hear another person say they want to use their expertise to solve our problems, God help me. Anyone would be pulling their hair out.

When NAMA was selling Project Abbey, which belonged to the developer Harcourt, NAMA representatives boasted at the housing committee last year that they had taken that 72-acre portfolio and that it was land for the State, which was needed for housing, so they were doing a good job. NAMA sold Project Abbey. What did it do with the land? A few weeks ago, it did a deal with the same developer to build it out, but the developer was planning to sell the houses for €500,000-plus. What is the rationale? It is mad. Money is scarce but we are giving it to these guys to build unaffordable housing because €500,000 or €400,000 is not affordable for most of the people in this country who need housing. What about the people who have to spend too much money trying to get a mortgage and trying to pay rent? The percentage of their wages that is going towards keeping a roof over their heads does not make economic sense or social sense, but we are doing nothing about it because one of our biggest problems of all is that we think: "Let the private market at it. They will sort it out."

The reason NAMA gets developers to build out projects and lets the developer make a huge profit of €50,000-plus a unit is because it does not have the expertise itself, so it is paying through the nose for the developer's expertise, because the developer has it. Builders have it too, if we were prepared to organise them. Builders are not looking to make €50,000-plus a unit, however, and they would be very happy making €5,000 or €7,000 a unit clear - they would be delighted with themselves. There are plenty of builders but they cannot get funding because the banks are closed to them and, as far as I can see, the State is also closed to them. We would rather be giving the money we can get our hands on to vulture funds to build apartments and houses that the people cannot afford to buy and cannot afford to rent. It is ridiculous.

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