Larry Butler (Fianna Fail)

A point was made earlier today that the banks did not intend to honour an €11 million cheque paid out by a certain company for a contract because of the NAMA commitment. If NAMA is not a working body at present, how can the banks make that statement? The lending institutions must be careful about what they are doing at this time. It is not right to use legislation that has not yet left the House and for institutions to make excuses that they cannot do this or that because of NAMA. However, the Minister has just cleared up this point.

Second, Senator Burke referred to McInerney Homes, which is a house building company. It will have to make a business plan, which it will presumably put to NAMA. The main reason NAMA might hold up some of its developments is because it would not be able to sell some of the houses on the market. That is the reality at present and why we have NAMA in the first place. We cannot blame NAMA for the fact there is no market. In fact, NAMA is to achieve the opposite in that no fire sales will take place because NAMA will control most of the property market. This is a good thing in a way, because property will increase in value much more quickly because of NAMA. When there is a scarce commodity, which property will be, the market certainly moves more quickly.

I do not accept that Senator Burke's point is correct. If whatever company goes into NAMA has a good business plan, it will be able to continue to work within NAMA. However, such companies will have to have liquidity and credit through NAMA. It will be critical that NAMA deals with business plans quickly because, if it was not to deal with them on an urgent basis, we could find that we would be putting many companies that could stay in business out of business. That is a key point.

The three arms of NAMA - business, credit and the special purpose vehicle - must work very closely together. If they do not, we would certainly have a problem. I ask the Minister to clarify what kind of mechanism would be put in place to deal with the business plan and make sure it is not being frustrated in the system, as we find with regard to red tape in legislation whereby business cannot function. I hope the Minister can deal with those questions.