NAMA: the 1,000-mile-long Houdini act

HEADLINE news in recent times would have one believe NAMA was the biggest thing to hit Ireland since the Norman invasion.

This four-letter word that rings so positive and slips from the tongue like a musical notation is, in fact, the National Asset Management Agency. In practice it is a new bank designed to perform a Houdini act by making approximately €90bn worth of bad assets disappear from the accounts of the state’s financial institutions – to be reprocessed secretly in the hope of creating a new Celtic Tiger in about 10 years’ time.

In reality, NAMA is a government compound holding the largest land bank and diversified building complex, creamed with ingenuity and greed, that this country has ever seen.