John Mulcahy, the head of asset management at Nama, gave a rather colourful account on Wednesday of some of the headaches facing the agency, in an address to the International Corporate Restructuring Summit at the Convention Centre Dublin.

Mulcahy was talking about how Nama has facilitated the sale of certain signature buildings and how it has worked with the IDA on the sale or letting of headquarter buildings to certain multinational clients, such as Kerry Group at Millennium Park in Naas and Scottish and Southern Energy for its new corporate headquarters at Leopardstown.

But for Nama, there is still no escaping the yoke of Anglo Irish Bank, whose half-built corporate headquarters still lies empty in Dublin's north docklands.

"We sold the old Anglo headquarters to the Central Bank on the basis that every film crew that came to Dublin wanted to shoot the Anglo building .

“It was like a burnt-out tank on the road to Kuwait as a symbol of our failure,” said Mulcahy.

Puncture
"We decided we had to get this bloody thing off our stocks. So we sold it to the Central Bank and I thought they would have started work by now but they seem to have got a puncture somewhere along the way.

“Hopefully, they’ll be starting very shortly.”

Did you hear that, Mr Honohan?