Nama and the banks have taken effective control of Michael McNamara and Company, one of the biggest building and civil engineering groups in the Republic, after the State's assets agency rejected the group’s business plan, The Irish Times reported. It is understood that the group voluntarily asked Dublin accountants and corporate insolvency specialist, Farrell Grant Sparks, to take over as receiver late last night.

Two Dublin-based estate agencies are to go into direct competition with insolvency accountants to handle the ever-increasing number of properties going into receivership, The Irish Times reported. The agencies are in the process of setting up individual insolvency divisions to manage non-performing property assets while a strategy is agreed to realise their maximum value. Commercial agent HWBC has formed a 50:50 joint venture company with UK agent Allsop to offer fixed-charge receivership in the Republic.

Interviews with dozens of bank and government officials, and an examination of documents released by the Irish parliament, reveal that Ireland misjudged its crisis early on. Desperate to preserve the homegrown banking system, the government—blind to just how sour Irish loans had gone—yoked the fate of the nation to the fate of its banks, The Wall Street Journal reported in an analysis. Along the way, the government was hobbled by faulty information from outside advisers, from a trust-and-don't-verify regulatory culture and from the troubled banks themselves.

The Construction Industry Federation told the board of the National Asset Management Agency (Nama) last month that its €5 billion working capital facility was “inadequate” to “manage [out] or improve” the €74 billion in distressed property assets that have been transferred from Irish-owned banks, The Irish Times reported. In a hard-hitting presentation, made to the board of Nama on October 7th and seen by The Irish Times , the federation added that “most borrowers now believe Nama to be a massive liquidation vehicle”.

Ireland's credit unions may need to be significantly restructured if arrears continue to rise and lending opportunities remain subdued, the official in charge of regulating the industry warned on Monday, Reuters reported. Some of Ireland's credit unions -- community-based savings and lending clubs owned by their members -- lent aggressively during the go-go years of the "Celtic Tiger" economy and are now struggling during a severe downturn.

Ireland's commercial-property bust has knocked the country's banks to their knees. Now the lenders are bracing for another blow: losses on home loans, The Wall Street Journal reported. So far, residential mortgages haven't been nearly as big a problem for Irish banks as their portfolios of loans to finance real-estate development and construction projects. Those ill-fated property loans have saddled the banks with tens of billions of euros in losses, forcing the government to mount a series of costly bailouts that have pushed Ireland to the brink of insolvency.

The High Court has ordered the liquidator appointed to building contractor Pierse to investigate the group’s activities over the last 18 months, following concerns raised by a number of its creditors, The Irish Times reported. Mr Justice Peter Kelly appointed Simon Coyle of Mazaars as liquidator to Pierse Contracting and Pierse Building Services after the two companies unexpectedly withdrew their petition for the High Court’s protection from their creditors. CF Structures, to which Pierse owes €5.7 million, and a number of other unsecured creditors, proposed Mr Coyle’s appointment.

Aer Arann’s future was secured yesterday after Ms Justice Mary Finlay Geoghegan agreed in principle to approve a modified scheme of arrangement put forward by the airline’s examiner, The Irish Times reported. This followed an 11th-hour deal between the Revenue Commissioners and Stobart, a British transport and logistics group that proposes to inject €2.5 million into Aer Arann. The Revenue Commissioners will now receive €436,000 that it is owed as a super-preferential creditor within 19 months.

Nama loaned an extra €47 million to developers earlier this year, even though many were not repaying debts they already owed the asset management agency, The Irish Times reported. In the first six months of this year, Nama paid five Irish banks a total of €8.4 billion to acquire property loans with a nominal value of €16.4 billion. Figures for the second quarter, released yesterday, show of the 1,190 debts it acquired, 887 were “non-performing”, meaning the developers who originally borrowed the money were not meeting interest or principal repayments.

The cost of insuring Irish government debt against the risk of default hit a record as investors continued to fret about the cost of bailing out the country's banks, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported. Insurance costs for other highly indebted euro-zone debt also rose amid ongoing worries about government finances. Insurance on $10 million of Irish debt, as measured by five-year credit default swaps, rose $27,000 to $525,000 a year, according to data provider Markit. One trader said Allied Irish Banks PLC's statement that the disposal of its U.K.