Homes being transferred by Nama for social housing are already used for that purpose

Brendan McDonagh, Nama Chief Executive, said that delivering upon the 2,400 units in Nama's stock that currently have planning permission or are under construction will be “very challenging” as the agency can only support projects which will achieve a profit. Photo: RollingNews.ie

A supply of 1,400 homes which the National Asset Management Agency (Nama) was due to transfer for social housing use under the Government’s Housing For All plan is already being used for that purpose.

Nama was before the Public Accounts Committee where it emerged that the 1,400 homes in question had previously been leased to approved housing bodies (AHBs) and are already occupied.

Chief executive Brendan McDonagh told the committee there are “very few mentions of Nama in Housing For All”, while committee chair Brian Stanley described the 1,400 figure as being “disappointing to say the least”.

The committee repeatedly probed Mr McDonagh about Nama’s contribution to increasing the national housing stock in the context of the housing crisis.

Mr McDonagh had said in his opening statement that delivering upon the 2,400 units in Nama's stock that currently have planning permission or are under construction will be “very challenging” as the agency can only support projects which will achieve a profit.

He said, to date, the agency has offered 7,000 homes to local authorities for social housing but that only 2,600 have been accepted by the councils, a figure which Sinn Féin’s Matt Carthy described as being “not great”.

“Personally I felt that all the properties were suitable,” Mr McDonagh said. “The feedback we got was that they were the wrong product type, or in the wrong location. The feedback from the housing agency was that local authorities felt they had sufficient levels of housing in the areas where we were offering up.”

“That wasn’t our decision,” he said.

He was asked by Social Democrats’ co-leader Catherine Murphy why 22,000 units for residential housing they hope to deliver going forward include roughly 19,000 units to be delivered by private developers and if this amounts to “bigging up” the agency’s output. 

Mr McDonagh said he “won’t accept that at all”.

“A number of debtors with us have paid off their debt to the taxpayer. When they do that they go elsewhere, but those units we count indirectly wouldn’t have happened without our support,” he said.

In terms of the impact of Covid-19 on the demand for commercial office space, particularly within Dublin’s docklands, Mr McDonagh acknowledged that had the pandemic happened in 2014 or 2015, prior to that land’s development, “I would have been very concerned”. 

“Thankfully,” he said, that hadn’t been the case.

The Nama CEO was also asked by Ms Murphy as to the circumstances which saw the Office of Public Works fail to bid on the Project Aspen portfolio in 2013, a situation which has seen the Garda command centre at Harcourt Square fall into the hands of private developer Hibernia REIT.

“It was always up to the OPW to make an offer. It didn’t for whatever reason,” Mr McDonagh replied. “That was outside our control.”