The National Asset Management Agency (NAMA) was created in 2009 to contain the spiralling fallout from Ireland's property crisis. Its job as Ireland's 'bad bank' was to act impartially to get the maximum return from the sale of assets for the Irish people and help pay down the state's massive debts. Now, after NAMA has presided over the transfer of €70 billion in assets, the Irish economy is once again beginning to recover. But the basic arithmetic of assets valued and assets sold hides a multitude of sins. Beneath NAMA's veneer of impartiality lies a world built on political patronage and nepotism, rife with conflicts of interest and vulnerable to shocking instances of corruption. Here, and for the first time, bestselling investigative journalist, Frank Connolly, unravels the scandal at the heart of NAMA's mission. Based on exclusive interviews with a wide range of interested parties, NAMA-land is the shocking story of how the sale of public assets conspired to disinherit the Irish people and enrich a new elite. 'Frank Connolly's careful and penetrating investigative research has exposed critical truths about malfeasance in high places and the often ugly workings of political power generally, actions that have caused great harm to the general population.' Noam Chomksy 'Without Frank Connolly we would not know about the scale of corruption that has infected Irish political and business life. He is the best investigative journalist we've had in this country.' Eamon Dunphy

The unprecedented housing and homelessness crisis in Ireland is having profound impacts on Generation Rent, the wellbeing of children, worsening wider inequality and threatening the economy. Hearne contextualises the Irish housing crisis within the broader global housing situation by examining the origins of the crisis in terms of austerity, marketisation and the new era of financialisation, where global investors are making housing unaffordable and turning it into an asset for the wealthy. He brings to the fore the perspectives of those most affected, new housing activists and protesters whilst providing innovative global solutions for a new vision for affordable, sustainable homes for all.

This toolkit is designed for policy makers and stakeholders who are considering the establishment of a publicly funded asset management company (AMC). An AMC is a statutory body or corporation, fully or partially owned by the government, usually established in times of financial sector stress, to assume the management of distressed assets and recoup the public cost of resolving the crisis. AMCs were first used in the early 1990s in Sweden (Securum) and the United States (the RTC), and again during the Asian crisis (for instance, Danaharta in Malaysia, KAMCO in the Republic of Korea). The 2008 financial crisis marked a renewal of the use of this tool to support the resolution of financial crises (for instance, NAMA in Ireland, SAREB in Spain). The toolkit does not address broader bank resolution issues. It has a narrow focus on the specific tool of a public AMC established to support bank resolution, and with the objective of providing insight on the design and operational issues surrounding the creation of such AMCs. It seeks to inform policy makers on issues to consider if and when planning to establish a public AMC through: · An analysis of recent public AMCs established as a result of the global financial crisis · Detailed case studies in developed and emerging markets over three generations · A toolkit approach with questions and answers, including questions on design and operations that are critical for authorities confronted with the issue of whether to establish an AMC · An emphasis on “how to†? that is, a practical versus a principled approach. The toolkit is structured as followed: Part I summarizes the findings on the preconditions, the design, and the operationalization of public AMCs. Part II provides case studies on three generations of AMCs, whose lessons are embedded in Part I. The case studies cover emerging and developed markets, and have been selected based on the lessons they offer.

Published by the South African colonial administration in the late 1920s, the purpose of this book was to present to the League of Nations a short sketch of each of the principal "tribes" in Namibia. Three of the chapters were written by Heinrich Vedder ("The Herero", "The Namas", "The Berg Damara"), while the chapters on "The Owambos" and "The Bushmen" were written by C.H.L. Hahn and L. Fourie, two South African colonial officials. The articles are mainly concerned with "anthropological zoo-ism",and are quite interesting as a distillation of the prejudices of colonial officials and as a reflection of the knowledge they thought they had on the historical/ethnological background of the peoples in the territory. The interest of the authors lie in magico-religious beliefs and "superstition", physical characteristics, puberty and initiation rites, laws and customs, the holy fire, and marriage and courtship, while there is less information on social conditions, material culture, production and trade.The contributions by Vedder contain some sections on history, based on premises such as that "the history of the Berg Damaras commences with the history of missionary activities amongst them". There are several photos and a brief bibliography at the end of each chapter. (Eriksen/Moorsom 1989).

The preservation of South Africa’s indigenous languages – the extinct Bushman and Khoikhoi languages in particular – is a pressing concern. Voices Past and Present serves as a comprehensive, scholarly and practical source for documenting and preserving some of them. The subcontinent of Africa has been inhabited by Bushman, Khoikhoi and Bantu-speaking peoples for thousands of years, and, for the past few centuries, also by European-speaking peoples. Contact between these peoples brought about changes in the different languages. As a result, modern languages are no longer identical to the original ones, many of which, especially in the case of the Bushman and Khoikhoi languages, have become extinct. Words used in ancient times and recorded long ago often bear no resemblance to their modern counterparts. In this book, Peter E. Raper provides a detailed investigation of the earliest recordings of words available. Words from Old Cape dialects are compared for correspondences in sound and meaning to words from 29 Bushman languages and dialects, as well as to words from Nama, Koranna, Griqua, !Xuhn, !Xoon, Khwe and N/uu. Voices Past and Present provides an extensive corpus of words that can be further utilised for the purpose of shedding light on the specific languages from which the recorded words (and names) were derived, on historical distribution of the various groups, on the classification of the different languages and peoples, for determining relationships or otherwise between the different languages, potentially identifying components of place-names and ethnonyms from ancient and extinct languages, and elucidating other matters that have long vexed scholars who have complained about a lack of recorded data.