In 2011, I travelled to Sandyford in south Dublin to meet Peter Bacon.

A high-profile economist, Bacon had been retained by the State in 2009 to design a body to absorb the distressed property debts from Ireland’s banks. 

The Irish economy was veering between chaos, crises, and calamity. Bacon’s proposal was the National Asset Management Agency (Nama), a body he envisaged would extract and maximise value by managing the vast amount of assets and debts on its balance sheet.

However, as we walked around Sandyford just two years later, which was strewn with half-built concrete shells and empty office and commercial buildings, Bacon had grown frustrated. The way he saw it, Nama had morphed into a debt-collection and sell-off agency.

Rather than manage assets, it was simply foreclosing on debts, fighting developers in the courts, and selling off loans.

Bacon had envisaged a nuanced agency that would help steer the property sector back to recovery. Instead, he felt it had become a blunt tool.

This weekend, Nama is finally being shuttered, 17 years after it came into effect. 

It is worth remembering the numbers. Nama purchased €72 billion worth of distressed property loans from the main banks in 2009 at a discount of €32 billion.

Overall, it worked down about 12,000 loans secured against 60,000 properties from 800 lenders. It was, for a time, the largest property company in the world.

Nama repaid the debt, along with €5.6 billion to the Exchequer via surplus cash, corporation tax, and the transfer of assets to the Land Development Agency.

The chief executive, Brendan McDonagh, noted in Nama’s 2025 annual report that it facilitated the “delivery of 44,500 homes during a decade when supply from other avenues was deeply constrained”. Considering that most economists agree Ireland now needs in the region of 50,000 new units a year, this number feels anaemic.

McDonagh also pointed to its work redeveloping the docklands and the Poolbeg Peninsula, something he said had “reshaped Dublin’s landscape”. This is something where it can take some credit, but much more must also go to the developers who did the building.

But as an agency born in a time of austerity ends in an age of prosperity, it is hard not to reflect upon Bacon’s criticism all those years ago. 

Could more have been achieved if the agency had not sold so much so quickly? And beyond the headline numbers, what will its legacy be?

Depending on who you talk to, Nama either helped bring the country back to financial solvency or had a major hand in the country’s housing crisis.

Certainly, it has questions to answer in relation to the housing crisis after it spent much of its earlier years pursuing and bankrupting many developers rather than working with them (It must be said that pursuing developers was in keeping with public sentiment at the time). 

Land hoarding

Its decision to offload vast loan books to a small handful of international private-equity giants and hedge funds did generate a sizable financial return, but it also placed vast land banks in the hands of international funds who had little interest in building houses. McDonagh admitted as much back in 2017, when he linked the low level of residential development on sites sold by his agency to land hoarding.

These criticisms are not new. Michael O’Flynn, a major developer, repeatedly argued that Nama should have secured guarantees on housing completions before selling multi-billion euro loan books. Instead, many funds were happy to hoard land and see the value of their holdings rise in a recovering economy.

Close to a decade ago, David Daly, one of the country’s biggest builders, likened the Nama sell-off to the plantations, arguing that Nama sold too early and too cheaply. He even commissioned a report by the economist Jim Power and Lisney, which argued that Nama could have made an additional €18 billion by holding and not selling.

Nama issued a firm rebuttal of the report. However, as I wrote at the time, it did not deny that it told Daly, a property developer who left Nama after repaying his debts in full, that he would never build another house while he was a debtor, at a time when the housing crisis was looming. 

Other developers have similar experiences. There is enough blame to go around in relation to the causes of Ireland’s housing crisis. But Nama must take a significant amount of blame – as I said, just 44,500 homes over 17 years for an agency that controlled the market is minuscule.

It is difficult to assess if Nama should have made more money. It was forced to sell quickly in those early days at the behest of Brussels and the ECB. But certainly, it is hard not to look at the work now being undertaken at Battersea in London, and wonder if the State missed the chance to have something akin to a sovereign wealth fund.

Interestingly, the agency commissioned a report last year from the economist John FitzGerald to look at the activities of Nama over its lifetime. Nama said it commissioned the report to “contribute to the public debate about the agency and its performance”.

The FitzGerald report said the €5.5 billion profit realised over 15 years was “significant”, with the agency earning a return of around 12.9 per cent annually. FitzGerald said this was a “reasonable” return on the original investment in Nama. Overall, he said Nama’s strategy was “broadly successful”.

The €5.5 billion is clearly welcome, but there is an argument that the country might have been better off if Nama pursued a more imaginative approach rather than simply maximising the return of profit. Its work in the Dublin docklands is admirable, and could have been a template for other areas in the country – think the provision of parks, pitches or public amenities as well as houses and apartments.

At a presentation of the Land Development Agency’s half-year progress last week, its chief executive John Coleman said locations like Cork’s docklands now offered his agency an opportunity to replicate what happened on Nama land in the docklands. There, several sites where offices had not been developed were eventually turned into apartment complexes – something few previously thought possible.

But Nama has long maintained that its mandate was about profit and maximising value for the taxpayer, and that is what it set out to achieve.

It is a shame because it was a once-in-a-century change to advance major civic projects or to reimagine public spaces.

There were controversies along the way, of course. Project Eagle cast a dark shadow, and the agency has been extremely prickly to any criticism. Some developers cried foul.

History will probably judge Nama as a financial success.

But that is not quite the same as saying it fulfilled the opportunity that the crisis presented. Certainly, its role in the housing crisis will stain, rightfully, its legacy.

It was not the agency that Peter Bacon envisaged. But it became an agency of its time.

Thankfully, that time has now passed.

Elsewhere last week…

Former Taoiseach Enda Kenny spent his career steering Ireland through crises, but his latest mission is focused on growth. The new chair of Ireland for Law is leveraging his political clout to promote Ireland as a top destination for global legal services. He spoke with Francesca.

Over three decades, Anne Heraty led CPL from foundation to sale. She explained to Stuart the many steps that have allowed the company to outlive her presence.

With the justice department refusing to budge on the new legal-aid flat fee and solicitors digging in, the criminal justice system is feeling the crunch. Court impact surveys released to Niall give a flavour of what may await.