THE NAMA legislation will have to be amended to reduce the risk to the taxpayer, according to Green Party chairman Senator Dan Boyle.
A national convention of the Green Party to consider the Nama Bill and the impending review of the programme for government could be held in early October, Mr Boyle said yesterday.
He said the party’s national executive would meet to consider how the membership could be consulted about Nama, the National Asset Management Agency, following motions from a number of constituency organisations calling for a convention.
Mr Boyle told The Irish Timesthat a date in early October, after the referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, would be a suitable time for a convention to consider Nama and the outcome of the programme for government review.
“By that stage the review should be completed and it would still be before the committee stage of the Dáil debate on Nama so we would be able to take the views of our members into account,” he said.
The Dáil will debate the second stage of the Bill for three days, beginning on September 16th, but the crucial committee stage, during which the Bill can be amended, will not take place until October.
Mr Boyle said he favoured amending the Bill to give more protection to the taxpayer along the lines advocated in The Irish Times by Prof Patrick Honohan of Trinity College. “The main concerns that the public have is that the exposure for the taxpayer is huge and there are legitimate questions about how the risk the taxpayer is being exposed to can be properly managed and shared,” Mr Boyle said earlier on RTÉ Radio’s This Week programme.
He said bank shareholders had to be involved in the risk because ultimately they were the people who would benefit. “If taxpayers’ money is going into such a process we have to make sure that the taxpayer is exposed for the smallest amount of time and the smallest amount of money and the legislation as it is written now needs to be tightened up in those areas in particular,” he said.
“The danger of Nama is that it could set an artificial floor on the price of property. We think that would repeat many of the mistakes that got us into the difficulty we are now in – [in] terms of an over reliance on property and development,” he said.
Mr Boyle said the Nama Bill was probably the most significant piece of legislation that this Government or any government in recent decades would have had to pass and that was what had led to such genuine public concern.
“The legislation has been published in a consultative form in any case and the expectation is that there will be and there have to be changes and as a membership based party our process will be to consult with our members to identify those changes,” he said.
Mr Boyle said the legislation had been brought out in draft form to allow the widest possible public debate to address many of the concerns.
Intense debate is currently taking place within the Greens about Nama. An e-mail in circulation among key Green members maintains that paying above the current market rate for bank assets would amount to giving the banks free money. “Giving the banks free money, funded by tax hikes and cutbacks, is to reward them for the damage they have done to the economy, and further punish their victims. Nama should pay the banks the current market value for those assets, which will be often near zero, regardless of the previous crazy valuations of those assets,” says the e-mail.
It adds that any further capital needed by the banks should be paid for with bank equity, right up to full nationalisation.
