Mountcharles: Developers toasted NAMA rescue in Spain
He said that a close friend overheard a group of Irish developers and builders in a restaurant in Puerta Banus, near Marbella, earlier this month, singing about the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA) and toasting Finance Minister Brian Lenihan.
“They were having a conversation about building matters and sites, and then they started singing... and they were clinking their glasses and having a fun old time. They then stood up and toasted the Minister for Finance,” Lord Mountcharles told Marian Finucane in an interview on RTÉ radio.
A former election candidate for Fine Gael, which is firmly opposed to the NAMA legislation introduced in the Dáil by Mr Lenihan last week, Lord Mountcharles said that his friend was gobsmacked and disgusted by what he saw and heard.
“You can imagine if something like that happened in the circumstances in which we find ourselves in a restaurant in the middle of Dublin, these people would have been lynched, I just find it offensive.
“I think the public need to know this kind of behaviour is going on. I think it’s obscene and debasing that because they were in Puerta Banus and... not in a cheap restaurant, out of the eyes of the Irish public that they could get away with this kind of thing.
Lord Mountcharles said he believes Brian Lenihan is a man of honour and that he is trying to address the problems in the banks, and that something along the lines of NAMA may have to be done.
“But it leaves ordinary taxpayers with a terrible sense that these people are unaccountable, they’re still living high on the hog and we’ve been suckered. What we need is the kind of patriotic behaviour that was, for example, taken by [former Fine Gael leader] Alan Dukes [in the 1980s] when he stood, and it must have churned his stomach at the time, behind Charlie Haughey,” he said.
