Ryan denies cuts to fund Nama

Minister for Communications Eamon Ryan today denied the National Asset Management Agency (Nama) would be funded by cutbacks in the public services.

Speaking ahead of today's Cabinet meeting, the Green Party minister said: "There's so much commentry [that] we're taking money from our schools budget, our health' budget - we're not."

Mr Ryan said: "We have access to funding from the European Central Bank which we can use in an intelligent way to work out that position that developed in recent years."

"But, the first people to pay will be those speculators, or developers or bankers who actually made the wrong call," he insisted.

Mr Ryan said the taxpayers' role in relation to the Nama is not to bail out the property speculators or bankers but he admitted payment for speculative land would be "massively discounted".

He said the establishment of the agency was a "very complex issue, very complex detailed legislation."

He said his party was working to improve the legislation which is still at its formative stages.

"And obviously it is draft, it's not finalised, so we can further improve it and that's what the Green Party are insisting on - and that's why we are in Government."

Mr Ryan said developers, speculators and bankers would pay for Nama.

"The taxpayers' job in this is not to bail them out, is not to provide any support to speculative decisions that were wrong," he told RTÉ.

"Our job is to get the economy working again and we have, with the assistance of the European Central Bank, the mechanism with which we can do that."

Commenting on today's article in The Irish Timesby 46 economists who called for the Nama project to be reconsidered, Mr Ryan said:

"They should have been there been there five years ago or four years ago "when the real economic mistakes were being made in terms of a property bubble and a macro economic policy that actually should have been different."

"I wish they'd actually come out at that time and said that we need to be doing things differently," he added.