It doesn’t sound good when even the chief executive can’t cope. Back in December, NAMA published a review of its activities in which it confessed that chief executive Brendan McDonagh had an “intense workload” and that administrative work was consuming a lot of time internally at NAMA. It said the agency needs to employ another 200 people to work on restructurings.

But would you really want to work for NAMA when the culture is allegedly an issue?

Low pay, hard grind?

By its very nature, the work undertaken by NAMA can be stressful and bureaucratic. The agency is managing what are often uncooperative borrowers and businesses with a lack of control and governance. Administrative procedures must be imposed if the loans are to be recovered, and NAMA must do the imposing.

People are predictably unwilling to criticise NAMA on the record. Off the record, however, they agree that the agency has its challenges.

We spoken to one former senior NAMA official who claimed to have left because bureaucracy was such an issue. The decision making process is slow, he complained, and pay is inadequate: “People need to see remuneration for their work. If they don’t, they’ll go elsewhere.”

One recruiter told us that individuals joining NAMA from the private sector often struggle with the time it takes to make decisions.

It’s getting better

On the other hand, NAMA has its defendants. Mark Middleton from recruitment firm Executive Connections says NAMA has: “a culture of hard working experienced professionals who are focused on achieving results.”

Middleton claims the NAMA workload is manageable and mainly falls on “the portfolio managers and executives managing the loan portfolios.”

David Clerkin, a spokesperson for NAMA, is equally keen to dispel any negative conceptions about the agency as an employer. He says that “During its start-up phase, NAMA staff workload was very high as, by necessity, it was not possible to recruit suitably qualified staff quickly. With staff numbers now approaching 200, the workload has been spread so as to reduce the burden on individual staff substantially”.

Clerkin also states that “NAMA is not a bureaucratic organisation: it aims to be rigorous in its review of credit proposals (which usually involve the spending of taxpayers’ money) but efficient in its decision-making.

“NAMA exists because the banking culture that operated inIrelandbetween 2003 and 2007 was very efficient but far from rigorous,” Clerkin points out. Like it or not, bureaucratic rigour is what Ireland’s banking system needs.