The National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA) has declined to say what future role Brendan McDonagh, the chief executive of the National Asset Management Agency (Nama), will hold as the crisis-era toxic property loans organisation is wound down in the coming months.
It comes as the Government published draft legislation on Tuesday that will pave the way for Nama’s dissolution and transfer of its remaining assets – as well as the remnants of Irish Bank Resolution Corporation (IBRC) – to a resolution unit within the NTMA.
The National Treasury Management Agency (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026 is expected to be enacted before the Oireachtas’s summer recess.
Nama was set up in 2009 under the NTMA. McDonagh, an employee of the NTMA since 2002, has been the head of the Nama since its inception in 2009 and is on a salary of €430,000 a year.
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A spokesman for the NTMA, which is led by chief executive Frank O’Connor, said the agency “does not comment on individual employees”.
McDonagh was lined up early last year to become chief executive of the Government’s new Housing Activation Office. However, he withdrew from the process after it emerged that Government party Fine Gael had not been consulted on the matter or plans to keep him on his Nama salary level.
Nama said in December it had reached “substantial completion” of its wind-down programme and had handed more than €5.6 billion of cash and assets to the State.
That comprised Nama’s almost-€4.73 billion lifetime surplus, €450 million of corporation tax payments and the transfer of residential development property, valued at €425 million, to the Land Development Agency.
The fear when so-called “bad bank” Nama was set up in 2009 to take over €72 billion of distressed commercial property loans at a discounted price of €32 billion was that taxpayers would ultimately end up having to deal with a large Nama balance sheet hole.
The NTMA resolution unit is on track to end up with €30 million of a residual Nama portfolio and around five active legal cases.
The liquidators of IBRC – which housed the remains of failed lenders Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Nationwide Building Society – sold the last property asset on its books in late November at auction: a Dublin 4 apartment once owned by disgraced former solicitor Michael Lynn.
Sources have previously said that this left IBRC, which had a loan and assets portfolio with a par value of €21.7 billion when it was put into liquidation in early 2013, with one small loan on its balance sheet and a number of outstanding legal cases.
The NTMA must also find new roles in the near future for a team of about 10 banking and corporate finance specialists who are on secondment to the Department of Finance. The department set up the shareholding and financial advisory division during the financial crisis. This unit is likely to be wound down following the planned sale of PTSB, which is 57.5 per cent State owned, to Austria’s Bawag this year or early 2027.
The NTMA, originally set up in 1990 to manage Government borrowing and debt, has seen its mandate expand over the years to cover the State Claims Agency and two sovereign wealth funds set up in 2024.
Separately, the agency hired banks and brokers on Tuesday to carry out a €2 billion bond sale, which would result in the organisation covering most of its full-year funding target for 2026.
It has already raised €6.25 billion in the bond market this year. It previously stated that it planned to issue between €10 billion and €14 billion of bonds. That compares €8.25 billion raised in 2025.
