'Personally, once you say you're from Ireland, I think there's a huge level of acceptability right around the world'

If Nama is famously mysterious in terms of its inner workings, Brian McEnery, a long-time director of the agency, is in dire needed of reprogramming.

In the flesh the genial Limerick accountant is chatty and generous with his time - as we chat in the foyer of Dublin's Gresham Hotel McEnery leans in over his tea and scone to enthuse over a point, and at one stage grabs a scrap over paper from his bag to sketch out an investment schedule I'm struggling to take in without visual aids.

I've tied McEnery down as he bounces between assignments at home in Limerick, where the BDO partner is based; Dublin, where he spends a lot of his time; and Sri Lanka, where he's heading to evangelise for accountancy as a profession as president of the global Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (AACA).

We'll come back to that last point.

Brian McEnery is best known for his role at Nama, he's been on the agency's board since he was appointed initially by the late Brian Lenihan, and reappointed by his fellow county man, Michael Noonan.

Its widely reported that McEnery was Noonan's director of elections - suggesting a degree of closeness between the then finance minister and the agency.

It's not true, McEnery says. His home in Adare wasn't in Michael Noonan's East Limerick constituency when the accountant was active in politics.

"I was never Michael Noonan's director of elections, but I was (former Fine Gael TD) Michael Finucane's director of elections, in the neighbouring constituency."

His background is steeped in Fine Gael all the same - his mother's sister was married to the late John Boland, a senior Fine Gael minister through the 1980s, and former Limerick mayor Pat Kennedy is an uncle.

There's Fianna Fáil on his father's side, he points out.

Ultimately, it was accountancy, not politics, that landed him the Nama gig, he explains.

"The funny thing was I was ACCA Ireland president in 2009 and three nights in a row, because you do these dinners, I was sitting down beside the then Minister for Finance, Brian Lenihan, and on the third evening, it wasn't a dinner it was in Trinity College, he said to me - he was actually a very nice man, I have to say, a really exceptionally bright man - he said to me, 'oh we meet again' and I said yes, minister. And he… so that evening we just had a greater time to talk.

"He said 'there's a board coming up, now I can't tell you the details of it' but he said keep your eyes and ears open and he said, it 'might be worth your while'."

A few weeks later McEnery's wife heard an item on Morning Ireland about the establishment of what would become Nama, and that there'd be a call for expertise in insolvency and restructuring.

McEnery applied online and got the role.

In his own accounting practice he'd long specialised in insolvency work, along with the healthcare sector.

At Nama the scale of what had to be done was of a dramatically bigger order. "There were only a few employees then, there was nothing. And it was, I have to say, it was overwhelmingly daunting almost.

The idea of Nama was highly controversial - seen by many at the time as a bailout for builders, and by others as doomed to make a massive loss.

"It was originally suggested this would be a f***-up of all proportions," he recalls.

Neither of those original criticisms has been borne out, and McEnery, in the round, is happy to stand over the agency, as it approaches its last years.

"I do believe that the model was a good model. It was a decisive model."

Often accused of a fire sale, McEnery says that if Nama had refused to sell, the market could never have recovered, because investors would have always been waiting for the flood of assets that had to come sooner or later.

"Because the market would say what the hell, there's this huge overhang, you know, thousands and thousands and thousands (of property loans), and, you know, once they start opening the dam, it's going to collapse..."

Selling in the UK before Ireland was the right thing, he says, and has meant Nama didn't get stung when sterling plunged last year. "I genuinely think Nama has been very, very successful."

The timing has worked, because tougher banking rules, due from the end of this year, mean that if Nama hadn't acted the consequences for Ireland could have been dire, he says.

"There's two things going to happen in the accounting profession and the banking profession that are going to be very tumultuous in the coming 12 months and I believe that if Nama hadn't been, hadn't largely been done and dusted, it would have been very bad for Ireland."

He's talking about IFRS9 and full implementation of Basel III, tougher banking and accounting standards that will force banks to be more upfront about valuing loans at risk of losses. "When you add IFRS9 with Basel III, I think the banking sector generally is going to be in for a difficult period while those adjustments are going to be … and if they had stuff lurking, at this point they'd be in real trouble."

Nama, he says, is a big reason there should be less "stuff lurking" in Ireland.

Pre-crash his own accountancy profession was found wanting when it came to ignoring financial risks, he admits. If he isn't defensive about accountancy, there's a definite whiff of it when it comes to Nama. On scandals like the leaking of debtor information he makes no attempt to justify or diminish what happened, but on the broader strategy he insists the agency got it right.

"I wouldn't even try to say that there weren't days that were bad because there were ... but on balance, I think they're, you know, if they're there in terms of size, they're important, and process and procedures are important, particularly where you're dealing with sensitive financial matters of parties, but I have to say in terms of the bigger picture, has Nama been doing a good job? I absolutely believe it has."

Some of Nama's critics are those whose loans ended up with the agency, he points out.

The agency, he says, didn't sell to the "bottom feeders" who came in early, but needed to balance that by meeting Troika targets for debt repayment.

"These funds were coming in in 2010 and 2011 and going into government and saying isn't it terrible Nama won't deal with us. But we wouldn't deal with them, we were right not to deal with."

Later, Nama started to accelerate sales partially out of fear that Spain and Italy would hoover up the capital if Irish deals weren't available.

If it hadn't, and opted to hold loans long term as some critics now say it should, Ireland and the banks here, would be in a different position today, he says.

"I think they'd be in real trouble. Because I think there'll be a requirement for more capital into banks generally around the world, in the coming 12 months. And many regulators and governments realise. If we had that allied to a big huge property overhang, if Nama hadn't deleveraged ... so there's a lot of complex factors to be considered when you're saying should Nama have held on."

Nama has been a big, contentious, commitment, but the board isn't involved in day-to-day operations, which has saved him from getting ensnared in the minutia of deals - or from being lobbied by debtors or buyers, he says.

"Part of my role was around strategy around the governance, around the oversight of Nama and I genuinely, if there was a field down the road from me, my home, that was in Nama, I wouldn't know it. That's the truth. On one or two occasions, I was approached by community groups, or not community but maybe public bodies, and in those instances, I would have said to them there's a process around which Nama deals with public bodies, but again I wouldn't have got involved in it myself but I would have put them in the direction of somebody within Nama maybe."

Didn't he ever have anyone sidle up to him at an event, I ask?

"No, I didn't, because in actual fact there was a huge amount of coverage in the early days about the act and there was an awful lot of coverage where it was not just an offence to lobby but it was an offence for the person who was lobbied not to report it."

Nama has never been McEnery's day job. He's a chartered accountant, and a partner at accountancy firm BDO Ireland.

As well as dealing with bad debt cases, McEnery built much of his career advising investors in the health sector. If he talks about Nama in broad strokes, on health policy and funding of care, his gears shift to something much more intense and detailed, even joyful - the pen and paper come out when he talks me through the old capital model for nursing homes. Tax breaks in place before the crash became politically indefensible afterwards, but they built badly needed nursing homes and too few are being built now, he says.

He appears to know every trick in the book, and a few besides, when it comes to getting the best tax deal for investors buying into Irish healthcare. He's intensely interested in policy, funding and the investment side.

Right now, declining margins are putting international investors off Ireland despite the growing need for nursing homes beds, while many Irish operators must wait for old tax schemes to expire before they can go out an raise fresh capital.

Surprisingly, for a man I assume has a direct line to Government, McEnery says his ideas to unlock health investment, including unlocking tax-based investors early from old schemes, are falling on deaf ears.

"As a firm, we've made a number of submissions to Government. I've put in, BDO have put in I'd say two on my behalf, not on behalf of anybody (client) but just saying this is a problem. And, you know, government have decided not to do it. That's their prerogative of course but I see this as a funding constraint now."

Trying to juggle a role in the looming health crisis with Nama and BDO doesn't seem to phase McEnery, who comes across as a ball of energy.

Much of his energy at the moment is in fact focused outside Ireland, in his capacity as ACCA president.

He's been involved in the organisation at all levels since he joined the local chapter in Limerick two decades ago. He was elected Irish president in 2009 and is now coming to the end of a stint as global president, an elected, unpaid role that makes him essentially an ambassador for professionalization - especially in emerging markets.

The ACCA, he says, was founded in 1904 by accountants, who like himself didn't necessarily have a university degree or have served a (then) expensive articled apprenticeship.

ACCA's exam-based structures opened up the profession. The exams are rigorous, but anyone can sit them, he explains.

"The real growth is in China, India, Malaysia, Pakistan, I've been to Pakistan a few times. Huge growth, huge need in their economies. I used this figure when I was out in Pakistan recently. There's 200 million people in Pakistan and they have about 15,000 qualified accountants. We have six million people in Ireland and about 50,000 accountants."

Training young accountants for work in those developing economies is a huge opportunity and failing to do so will have dire consequences, he reckons.

"When I go there I can see that, you know. People with very high levels of youth unemployment, what are they going to do? You know we always used to say the devil makes work for idle hands. Well, they're idle, you know."

As he travels around being Irish helps, he says.

"Once you say you're from Ireland, I think there's a huge level of acceptability right around the world. The Irish personal resonates much more broadly than we think. I genuinely think we have great currency around the world, it's fantastic."