Where Deputy John McGuinness ended is a good place for me to start. You could not make it up and that is the truth about NAMA.

Sentiment score: 0.38

Absolutely. If only you had taken the left turn at the right point.

Sentiment score: 0.00

You would be in a different place. We might all be. When the history books are written, NAMA will go down as one of the greatest scandals ever. I find it pretty amazing, shocking really but maybe not totally surprising, that the Government tries to present it as some sort of success story. The State paid out €31 billion initially to take over the assets of the developers, who had bankrupted the country, leading to a decade of austerity and huge hardship for the country. We paid €31 billion and the Government's argument is that we got it back and we made €5.6 billion on top of it, so everything is fine and we could even put it down as a success. It was entirely predictable, and some of us predicted it and said it was absolutely clear at the time. The plan for the decision to sell off all those assets to investment funds and vulture funds was hatched when NAMA was originally set up with its mandate in 2009. Most of the sales, and the big push to sell off to the investment funds, happened under the Fine Gael and Labour Party Government that came into power in 2011. I came into the House in 2011 and I remember so well Michael Noonan saying it was necessary to restabilise the Irish property market. At the time some of us said this was a big mistake. We had the biggest property company in the world. I have been reading over some of the stuff and a huge amount of the property was in the Dublin area where the housing crisis is now concentrated. NAMA had the potential to build about 86,000 housing units. Some of us proposed at that time that all of these should be public and affordable housing. Against this, we can look at what the delivery of public and affordable housing has been in the years intervening. For most of the years of the fire sale to the vulture funds that Michael Noonan invited in, a lot of this was being co-ordinated by a group called the Clearing House Group, which had organised special access to the big companies, the Department of Finance and the Department of Taoiseach at the time. It was essentially writing the budgets. If I remember correctly, in 2013 Michael Noonan met 60 of these investment funds where they planned a massive sell-off of this enormous property portfolio, the biggest property portfolio in the world, to these investment funds. There was all this potential to deliver housing that could have been public and affordable housing but instead it was given to these investment funds and now we are buying it back. This is what is happening. The local authorities are buying it back and approved housing bodies are buying it back to provide social housing but at the prices set by these developers who got it from us at knockdown prices. The real maths and arithmetic of this is that we paid €31.8 billion and got €5.6 billion in profit, which amounts to €36.4 billion, but in the intervening period between 2010 and 2025 house prices went up 150%. If we take the figure of €31.8 billion as the bottom of the market for the portfolio - the par value was €70 billion but that is what we paid for it - a 150% increase brings it up to €79.1 billion. We got back €36.4 billion but it went up to at least €79.1 billion and probably more in reality. This is a back of the envelope calculation; it is probably an underestimation of what its actual value was when it was being built out and sold off. The investment funds, the property speculators and the developers walked off with about €42 billion. This is probably a conservative figure but I would say it is the minimum that they walked off with. This is all maths but I will translate it to Cherrywood, one of the big sites that NAMA took over from developers who helped bankrupt the country. It is the biggest residential development in the country and it is in my area. If we include the really expensive houses, the average price there is €1 million. If we take out the really expensive ones, the average price is €600,000 to €700,000. This is what people have to pay to buy them. This rules out the ability of 80% or 90% of ordinary people to buy them. I would say that roughly 80% to 90% of people could not possibly afford them. This is what they sell for. If we look at houses being sold in Cherrywood at that moment we see they are this price. They were all in our hands. Not only this but to take Cherrywood as an example, we put €15 million of taxpayers' money into infrastructural funding for that development. The parks and the roads were paid for by the public but the developer walks off with the profits, selling the houses at €600,000 and €700,000. Insofar as we get 10% social housing, we have to pay developers for it at prices they set. We sold for a song. In this case Hines, one of the big investors invited in at the time, sat on it for about ten years. It was in no hurry to build. It was flipping sites. Mel Reynolds reckons that Hines had made profit before a single brick was laid in Cherrywood because it had already started to flip parcels. TASC has done reports on the wider NAMA portfolio. A lot of the investors who bought had no intention of building; they were just going to hang on until the housing crisis got bad enough that their property investment had increased in value and then they would sell it on. They would sit on it. They wanted to wait and create a housing crisis before they would even consider building or, more likely, flipping it on to somebody else who would then build it out but at massively inflated prices and then we buy it back from them. The Mafia could not have made this one up. We sell it to them at a song, they make massive profit and we buy it back from them. We paid for the infrastructure. We provided LIHAF funding of €15 million with regard to Cherrywood, to give one example. In the original proposal around LIHAF funding, there was supposed to be a 40% give-back of the development in terms of affordable housing. That was dropped within about four weeks. It was taken off the original LIHAF proposal. We thought it was happy days and that we would get 40% social housing and a big chunk of affordable housing because the State had put in this LIHAF funding. That was then dropped and there was no 40%. We were going to get €15 million worth of affordable housing - in other words, we were going to get back what we put in. This would have been a disgrace but we did not even get that. Does the Minister of State know how much affordable housing we got in Cherrywood? None, zero, not a single affordable house. It is unbelievable. Developers just do not do it. Not only this but Cherrywood was supposed to be a flagship development and it was not going to repeat the mistakes of the past. It was to be a new town, the biggest residential development in the country and one of the biggest in Europe. It was going to be a ten-minute town. People would not need a car, and we need to get people out of their cars, because they could walk to everything. There would be parks and infrastructure paid for by the people. There are €600,000 or €700,000 houses, which only a small group of people can afford, and all of the stuff we buy back but at least people would be able to walk to the town centre. There was going to be a town centre. Does the Minister of State know what the town centre is? It is a massive hole in the ground that the developers refuse to build. It is not profitable for them. They do not want to build a town centre. They have no interest in a town centre. Now they have variations on the strategic development zone in order to increase the density so they can make more profit by building more units on the site, or so it becomes more valuable after it gets the planning permission for it or the change in zoning for it. Their investment increases in value again but the people do not have a town centre. I will give an example of how ridiculous it is. There is a bridge that carries the Luas from one side to the other. There is supposed to be a pedestrian bridge as well because there are people living on the other side. However, the developer does not want to build the pedestrian bridge either because it is connected to the town centre. They just do not want to build it. Young kids are running along the Luas line from one side to the other in what is a serious safety hazard because the only shop is a Spar Express across the road from where the town centre is supposed to be. There is supposed to be a town centre with doctors, cinemas and supermarkets but there is just a big, massive hole in the ground and they are allowed away with it. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael councillors are voting in Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown to give them increased densities, so their investments are worth more. You could not make it up. That is replicated all over the country with the NAMA portfolio. Mel Reynolds estimated that NAMA had 70% of the zoned building land around the greater Dublin area at one point. It was the whole land bank. It dictated what we are seeing now, which is house prices nobody can afford. Who can afford that stuff? The big investment funds can buy it up or the State pays massively over the odds to buy back what it originally sold at a knockdown price. That could all have been social and affordable housing, and we could have solved the housing crisis. Now they have gone through all that and largely made their profits from the NAMA portfolio and we are going to do it again. We have not learned the lesson of the massive mistake of allowing these guys to run off with all the profits, control the housing sector, drip-feed the housing and profiteer from it and end up selling it back to us at extortionate prices that nobody can afford. They are fuelling the housing and homelessness crisis. We are now going to do it all over again by rezoning a big pile of agricultural land that is currently worth little. We are going to rezone it, so overnight it will be worth a fortune for its private owners, who are all the same people again - the land bankers and the speculators. This is happening as we speak, and I am amazed that nobody is ringing the alarm bells. To my mind, the scandal is beyond belief. This varies but roughly speaking in the Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown area zoned agricultural or green space is €80,000 per hectare. If it is zoned as residential that value goes from €80,000 per hectare to €5 million per hectare. That is a 625% increase overnight to the owners of that land. That has just been voted through in Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown. It goes without saying that we voted against it. The Fianna Fáilers and Fine Gaelers voted in favour of this. Overnight, the owners get a 625% increase in their investment for doing nothing. They are made multimillionaires but this is not a victimless crime. Where does the money come from? It is just like what happened with NAMA. Somebody is going to pay for this. The person who is going to pay is the end purchaser of the home or the renter. When the houses are finally built, if they ever are by the way, they will do exactly the same. They have over zoned. This proposal from central government is that the national framework is looking for land for 528,000 new homes and for 15,000 ha to be rezoned. However, the required council land is for 300,000. We are massively over zoning by 50% but the people who own this will be made multimillionaires overnight. As I said, it is a 625% increase. When and if they build, they will be selling for €600,000, €700,000, €800,000 or €1 million, which is what some of the stuff is now going for in Cherrywood. The ordinary person trying to buy a home pays for this or, because not many working people can afford that, the big investment funds will buy it and rent it out, and they will rent it at €3,000 or €3,500 per month. That is what it is going for in Dun Laoghaire at the moment. They are making an absolute fortune from unaffordable rents and fuelling all the homelessness and despair over extortionate rents that nobody can afford. That is the increased value that land has now been given because of a vote by a group of councillors in Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown. They are going to do the same in South Dublin, Dublin city and in Fingal. That is where that money comes from. It ends up in houses that cost between €600,000 and €800,000 or rents that are €3,000 or €4,000 per month. Ordinary people pay. Maybe, as we did the last time, the State will end up buying it back, instead of us just bringing the agricultural land into public ownership and rezoning what we need to build public and affordable housing. That is what they do in places like Finland where they have actually tackled the housing crisis and reduced homelessness, and where most of the land bank is in the control of the public authorities. It does not mean there is no private housing. I often hear the Government say that we do not want any private housing. That is not true. In Helsinki, the public authorities decide what is built and whether it is going to contribute to providing housing that is needed, is affordable and so on. Here, we just hand it over to the speculators, the hoarders and the profiteers in the property sector. We make people multimillionaires overnight and screw the vast majority of ordinary people who are just looking for an affordable roof over their head. It is a scandal this is happening when some of us argued way back when that the NAMA mandate should have been changed. We should have developed it as a State construction company and we should have taken the zoned land and the land we are planning to rezone into public ownership to build public and affordable housing. Even now, that is what needs to happen if we are to have any hope of solving the dire housing crisis. That is all history, arithmetic and all the rest of it. However, at the end of the day what it all comes down to is more than 17,000 families in emergency accommodation and thousands of people paying rents they cannot possibly afford. They are paying between 50% and 70% of their income on unaffordable rents, or people are mortgaged up to their necks. If anything goes wrong with the economy, we will find ourselves right back where we were after the crash in 2008 or 2009. If there is any wobble in the Irish economy and people are landed with these massive debts they cannot afford, we will be right back where we were in the previous crash that sent the entire country over a cliff. Will they ever stop? I do not think so. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are not going to stop.

Sentiment score: 0.03

I wanted it for the students.

Sentiment score: 0.00

We wanted it for students.

Sentiment score: 0.00

We wanted it in public ownership for the students.

Sentiment score: 0.00

He is just a profiteer.

Sentiment score: 0.20

He is the one who started it.

Sentiment score: 0.00