Chairman of the National Asset Management Agency, Frank Daly, has defended the staff costs incurred by the State’s so-called ‘bad bank’.

Mr Daly said only a handful of staff were being paid salaries of around €200,000, with the remainder far below that figure.

The agency currently has about 200 staff. Mr Daly said the average salary was "well below" €100,000.

However, he said the skillset needed to run Nama properly attracted a certain market rate.

"The reality is we're out there, we're facing the most sophisticated property cos across the world, equity funds, sovereign wealth funds, and we have to have expertise," he told RTÉ Radio, .

"Unfortunately maybe, that expertise is still very much in demand, so you have to pay the average market rate."

Mr Daly also defended the decision to keep some developers working in companies where Nama had taken over property loans, saying the alternative was the developer walking away from the company and Nama being left to appoint receivers.

"There is a real value from keeping the debtor on board," he said. "He's the person who accumulated the portfolio, he's the person who knows the assets, and he's the person at the end of the day has a personal vested interest in working this out."

Mr Daly said the developers working with Nama were supervised and unable to borrow to the same level.

"The main area of their failure would have been the extent to which they borrowed, maybe unwisely," he said.

He said it was only in two cases that developers had attracted salaries of €200,000, but the developers had been managing a portfolio for Nama that was worth billions of euro.