I welcome the opportunity to contribute to the Second Stage debate on the National Treasury Management Agency (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026. This is, in effect, the Bill that closes the book on NAMA. It dissolves the agency, concludes the special liquidation of IBRC and transfers the small amount of residual activity to a new resolution unit within the NTMA. It is a technical Bill but it deserves a serious debate because behind it sits one of the most consequential interventions in the history of the State. NAMA was established in 2009 in the worst economic circumstances the State faced since the 1980s. It acquired 11,500 loans from five Irish banks. The par value of that loan book was €74 billion. The acquisition value was €31.8 billion. It involved over 800 debtor connections and 60,000 properties spread across multiple jurisdictions. Those are not ordinary numbers. They are the numbers of Ireland’s exposure to the international financial crisis and the result deserves to be noted. NAMA fully repaid the €32 billion in debt it issued to acquire those loans. It was self-financing throughout its lifetime. It has returned a lifetime surplus of €5.6 billion to the Exchequer. Not one cent of taxpayers' money was lost in the operation of the agency itself. Professor John FitzGerald in his independent review last year described that surplus as appropriate and reasonable. He concluded that NAMA was "broadly successful". International studies place it among the best examples of a State-backed asset management vehicle anywhere in the world. That is the legacy of the former Minister, Brian Lenihan. It worked in the end and it did more than balance the books. Of course, it did not get everything right. NAMA facilitated the delivery of over 44,500 new homes, though. It delivered nearly 3,000 social housing units directly. It transferred the National Asset Residential Property Service, NARPS, social housing portfolio and two major development sites with capacity for around 4,000 additional homes to the Land Development Agency last year, keeping those State assets in public ownership, which is important. In my constituency of Dún Laoghaire, NAMA-secured sites at Cherrywood and elsewhere played a real part in the housing that has been delivered in recent years. The regeneration of the Dublin docklands for example, a strategic development zone that was a wasteland a decade ago and is now one of the most successful urban quarters in Europe, would not have happened without NAMA. However, we should not allow the orderly end of the agency to become a story that flatters us into forgetting how we got here in the first place. NAMA existed because this country experienced a catastrophic failure of banking, regulation and political oversight in the years before 2008. Hundreds of thousands of jobs were lost. A generation emigrated and the €5.6 billion surplus is a fraction of what the wider banking collapse cost the public. NAMA succeeded in the task it was given but the task should never have been necessary. The question for this House, as we close out NAMA, is whether the lessons have been learned. I want to flag three. First, light-touch regulation does not work. The Central Bank has powers and independence today that it did not have in 2007. That must be protected, not eroded, and this should be remembered the next time the industry argues that rules are too tight. Second, concentration risk in our banking system remains real. The exit of Ulster Bank and KBC reduces competition further. I have highlighted this point in the House many times previously. I also note what Deputy Nash has just said in terms of PTSB and the recent developments there. The Department of Finance and the Central Bank must keep a careful eye on this particular aspect. Third, when the State takes on a complex tasks, clear statutory objectives matter. Professor FitzGerald again was very clear on this. The clarity of NAMA's statutory mandate and the way it was implemented made a major contribution to minimising the cost of the crisis. That is a lesson worth carrying into every State body we establish from hereon in. On the Bill itself, the provisions are sensible. The full repeal of the NAMA Act 2009, and the insertion of a new Part 6A into the National Treasury Management Agency Act 2014, gives NAMA a clean, consolidated statutory framework to bring the residual matters to completion. The scale is small. NAMA officials told the joint committee on finance last month that the resolution unit will begin with assets of less than €30 million, manage roughly eight outstanding litigation cases, and operate with eight staff for an estimated two years. That is the right scale for the job. NAMA is ending the way it should: quietly, in profit and on time. That is unusual for any State intervention and it deserves to be acknowledged. I want to express my thanks to the majority of the hard-working staff and management that delivered this result for Ireland. We need to ensure the lessons learned are remembered and that a NAMA-type bad bank is never required or needed again.

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