The chief executive of the National Treasury Management Agency has said it is not adequately staffed to deal with the banking crisis.
Dr Michael Somers also told the Public Accounts Committee he was not sure how the National Asset Management Agency would interact with his agency.
He said NAMA was supposed to be under the aegis of the NTMA, but added that the NTMA has no experience of bank restructuring.
He said the state of the banks' bad loans was an appalling dilemma, adding that he had been 'aghast' when he saw the amounts that had been lent by banks.
Dr Somers also said there would be 'eating and drinking' at the Public Accounts Committees for years to come on how NAMA is set up. He said it would be 'extremely constroversial', and the people in the courts were lining up for a bonanza.
Labour's Tommy Broughan challenged Dr Somers and the NTMA's performance and investment record. He said it had lost about €5 billion on the markets in the last year and a half.
Dr Somers said he had hired the best people in the world and they failed, but that everybody all over the world had failed.
Dr Somers also said he was told by former Taoiseach Albert Reynolds to set up the NTMA as a business, not like the civil service, and not to reveal salaries of senior management. He said he believed it would damage the organisation if the details were revealed. But Dr Somers later pointed out that the Comptroller and Auditor General did have those figures.
Meanwhile, Finance Minister Brian Lenihan has repeated that nationalisation of the banks should be the 'last resort'. But he told reporters on a visit to France that the Government could in theory end up with a majority stake in AIB and Bank of Ireland as the results of the NAMA plan.
