THE OPPOSITION parties have again attacked Nama legislation before Monday’s meeting of the Oireachtas Committee on Finance at which Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan will explain the provisions in the draft Bill.
Labour Party spokeswoman on finance Joan Burton said yesterday that Mr Lenihan would have his work cut out if he wanted to pull public opinion around in support of Nama because TDs of all parties were aware of the deep suspicions held by ordinary citizens about the project.
Nama – the National Asset Management Agency – is the “bad bank” being set up by the Government to buy toxic loans.
“All this week Brian Lenihan has engaged in a desperate media blitz to shore up the Nama project,” said Ms Burton, who added that he had repeatedly assured people that it would end up costing the taxpayer nothing and could actually result in a profit in the long term.
“Brian Lenihan’s assurances have all the value of a debased currency. We have been fooled so often even in the recent past that it would be well to discount all his pledges as utterly worthless.”
Ms Burton said there were two aspects of Nama that concerned Labour. One was Section 58 of the Bill which sets out the principles for valuing the bank loans to be transferred to Nama. The other was the powers that the Minister proposes to assume for himself in many sections of the Bill.
“This aspect had had little attention so far but I propose to ask many pertinent questions about it when the Minister comes to the Dáil committee on Monday.
“The Minister has told the public that Nama will be independent of Government, and this is supposed to be guaranteed in Section 9 of the Bill. Brian Lenihan knows full well that ordinary citizens would never tolerate political interference in its decisions by a party with Fianna Fáil’s reputation for planning corruption and favouritism to its developer friends,” said Ms Burton.
She said while there was an assurance in Section 9 that Nama would be independent, there was an escape clause in the same section which diminished the very independence it was supposed to guarantee. “All through the rest of the Bill Nama, in all major respects, is not independent at all but must in the performance and discharge of its functions and powers act at the direction of the Minister irrespective of whether, in its view, what the Minister requires it to do is prudent or appropriate. This is exactly what many citizens fear about Nama.”
Fine Gael spokesman Phil Hogan said the taxpayer was growing increasingly afraid of Nama and he cited an interview on RTÉ Radio with Fianna Fáil TD Frank Fahey yesterday which was “a scary revelation” of the mindset driving the project.
“The economic illiteracy behind the Nama developer/banker bailout was exposed by Frank Fahey when he claimed that the property market had rebounded and that money borrowed by the Irish Government to fund Nama was not going to have to be paid back by Irish taxpayers. If this is the level of understanding of the issues facing the Irish economy then it should come as no surprise that Fianna Fáil have driven us into a deep depression.”
