Nama ‘has built 7,000 homes’

NAMA has claimed that it has built more than 7,000 homes over the last three years.

Its end-of-year summary for 2017 says it has made progress on key objectives such as social housing, other homes, the development of the Dublin Docklands Strategic Development Zone and paying off debt.

Nama, the National Asset Management Agency, was set up in 2009 in response to the financial crisis as a way of bailing out banks sinking under the weight of bad debts.

However, the so-called ‘bad bank’ has had its critics who have accused it of selling off assets too quickly, which subsequently enabled vulture funds and others to make what critics have said is profit at the State’s expense.

In one notorious controversy, Project Eagle, which was Nama’s Northern Irish property portfolio, the agency lost millions of euro by the time it was eventually sold, it is claimed. It has also been criticised for alleged failures to address the housing crisis.

But in the report released yesterday, the agency said that to date it had invested approximately €350million in completing and purchasing properties for social housing.

The report also said that the agency, headed by Brendan McDonagh, currently expects to return a surplus of €3billion to the Exchequer by the time it completes its work in 2020 – subject to market conditions.