National Treasury Management Agency (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026: Second Stage
Seanad Éireann — 2026-07-02
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Pauline Tully (SF), Cultural and Educational Panel

Sinn Féin will engage constructively with the Bill. We support the orderly winding down of NAMA, the completion of the IBRC process and the transfer of the remaining activities to the NTMA. However, let me clear that we will continue to demand accountability for the failures of the banking collapse and for the deeply damaging and flawed political choices that followed. Those choices cost people their homes, their livelihoods and their futures. Accountability cannot be brushed aside simply because an agency is being wound down. The Government would like to portray this as the successful conclusion of a dark chapter in history but it is not a conclusion. Ordinary citizens of this State continue to be impacted to this day.
The NAMA fire sale of assets was the prequel to the current housing disaster, and yet again we see soaring housing lists, rising homelessness and rents going up and up. Members of the Government have, in the past, spoken confidently about the State recovering all moneys owed on these loans. This did not happen. Tens of billions of euro were not recovered for the taxpayer. NAMA sold assets instead of managing them, and did so at a time when it did not seek to maximise value.
That is the reality.
I would not describe NAMA as a success. It facilitated the fire sale of a massive volume of Irish assets to vulture funds. The Comptroller and Auditor General stated that NAMA failed to meet its own targets in social housing and land disposal, yet we still hear attempts to defend the fire sale approach. The CEO of NAMA stated in the Oireachtas that everything was done correctly, but the public deserves to see the full picture, warts and all. For this reason, an Teachta Doherty proposed a simple and reasonable amendment to this legislation. He asked for the production of a report on NAMA's performance, including whether higher rents could have been achieved had the property portfolio been managed for longer rather than sold off. That is all we asked for - transparency, accountability and a factual assessment of what happened. NAMA took on €74 billion in loans. It recovered €37 billion, less than half of that. That is a reality and it is why Sinn Féin pushed for a report. As NAMA is wound up, the public deserve to know how an agency that took on €74 billion in loans ended up recovering less than half of that. They deserve to know whether better management, longer term planning or a different strategy could have delivered higher returns for the State. They deserve to know whether the decisions made were in the public interest or in the interests of expediency.
The winding down of NAMA should not mean the winding down of accountability. The legacy of NAMA is the missed opportunities for social housing, the failure to use land strategically and the billions of euro lost to the taxpayer. It is the fact that public assets were sold off when they could have been used to deliver homes, communities and long-term public value. Sinn Féin will continue to demand answers and we will continue to challenge the narrative that NAMA was some kind of success story. It was not. It was a response to a crisis created by political choices and it was shaped by future political choices that did not serve the public well. As this Bill proceeds, Sinn Féin will engage constructively, but we will also be firm. The public deserves transparency and accountability.

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Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-07-02/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:09+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-07-02