Eoghan Harris (Independent)

The Minister should not give any hostages to fortune. None of us should give hostages to fortune. All the Minister can do is say, "This is the best I can do". We should give it a fair wind.

That does not mean that there are not problems with the proposal. There are two problems with NAMA. They are both problems of public perception. The first is that it is seen as a bailout. To deal with that, in a kind of populist mode, reference has been made to surcharges and talk of further punitive measures and regulations. The question of bailout and profits would be more usefully tied to the relaxation of the lending mechanisms about which Senators Ross and MacSharry spoke so eloquently. Rather than hounding the banks on the matter of profits and surcharges, I would be happy if any profits they made were immediately released to small and medium-sized business enterprises and used to bring about the relaxation of credit that we so desperately need. I do not believe the public perception that this is a bailout for developers and bankers is well founded. Senator Ross is correct in that regard. That will not prove to be the problem in the long run.

The second problem with NAMA is the most important one, namely, the danger that those in default seem to be liable on far too narrow a front. If builders are in default we must widen the circumstances in which their wealth and capital is only accessible in terms of the narrowness of the loan they contracted originally. To prevent the public from having a well-founded scepticism, we need measures to ensure that on default of a loan, we can get some access to the other wealth of defaulters that is protected by the usual mechanism of putting their wealth in the names of family members or by using other vehicles. The current banking regulations on the recovery of debt seem too narrow and that is something the Minister should examine.

NAMA has no mechanism currently to circumvent normal banking practice to make good the loans. By that I mean that if a company or other entity cannot pay back its loans, it may walk away from them to the extent that other security guarantees are not involved. NAMA should be empowered to apply new rules that would force the parties to the loans, namely, the borrowers, to repay their debts even from resources that were not part of the original security, provided it is possible for them to do so. Under normal circumstances a bank might write off the debt. These are unusual circumstances and we need to change the rules. It might be necessary to follow purely commercial lines in the national interest but it is wrong to place an unbearable burden on the taxpayer to shelter the wealthy from their own losses. We need new rules and new criteria for dealing with this issue.

I found some aspects of the Dáil debate frivolous, time wasting and too full of party partisanship. I wish the Opposition, in particular the Fine Gael Party which has so many illustrious former leaders and members telling us that for better or worse NAMA is the only game in town, would lend its great resources and expert knowledge to improving the Bill rather than debating the foundations of the world from the beginning, so to speak. There is no question of having a different car for the journey. We have this car for the journey. It is the only car we have. We should fine tune its engine and make it fit to get us to our destination. Stopping the debate every so often to argue about whether we should have started out with this car is not useful at this stage.

NAMA is a necessity. It is not simply an economic measure but an act of political economy. It is carried out in contingent circumstances by flawed human beings so we should approach the journey armed with the political virtue on which all other virtues are conditional, namely, courage. NAMA meets Aristotle's definition of courage as a halfway point between cowardice and foolhardiness. We would be cowardly to do nothing. It is not possible for us to do nothing. We would be wrong to be foolhardy. NAMA is neither foolhardy nor cowardly. It is a brave project. It is most likely a flawed project but we should give it a fair wind, which is why we should all say to the Minister, bon voyage.