IT was great to see Taoiseach Brian Cowen choose Galway Races to urge everyone to join him for a mega-punt on Nama. What an apt choice of location.

The state asset management experiment has as good a chance of success as an outsider in the Galway Plate, despite Ballyholland's win at 16-1 last week.

Nama is the new fantasy property game. Nearly all the usual players are rolling up their sleeves and joining in.

The pitch has been well watered to suit the establishment, not the taxpayer. It seems to have been seeded with magic mushrooms.

The mandarins of the Department of Finance love Nama; Brian Cowen loves it; the Financial Regulator loves it; the banks love it; accountants love it. They are all on the mushrooms.

And next month, the Nama game will be endorsed by the Dail and the Seanad. The majority of Ireland's oligarchs will line out to play the Nama fantasy game.

Nama, a fantasy?

Precisely. Look at the prices it is so anxious to pay for worthless assets.

The taxpayer will pay the banks a good price for bad assets. We know that it will pay above market value, the only question now being by how much?

On Thursday evening -- as the Nama document was being launched -- all the interested parties were ecstatic. The mushrooms were working -- we will pay billions for assets which would fetch zero on the open market, assets that no one else wants.

Quite a mug's game, you might think. And you would be dead right.

To buttress up the game, a new language has been invented.

Last week government spokesmen were insisting that we will be paying a "long- term" price, or even a "medium-term" price, terms used to satisfy an increasingly irritated European Commission.

Europe is a bit puzzled. They rightly see Ireland's Nama as a monopoly. It is a monopoly because it is the only buyer in the Irish property game. So Europe sets rules, principally to ensure that the monopoly buyer (Nama) does not crucify all those forced sellers, the poor banks.

It seems the Europeans never heard of the way we do these things in Ireland. We have invented a unique monopoly -- a fantasy monopoly, unheard of in the history of commerce. A monopoly that screws itself, not the customer; a monopoly that is programmed to make a loss. Our special monopoly pays too much, not too little.

Nama's "long-term" language is based on the assumption that property prices will rise in the next five to seven years, that sometime over that period the poor taxpayer -- who has paid too much -- will begin to recoup his losses.

Fine thoughts, but there is a small problem: there is no reason on God's earth for believing that property prices will rise even as high as the fantasy "long-term" prices to be paid by the taxpayer. They are equally likely to continue falling.

Not so, say the fantasists. The valuations will be "through the cycle" valuations, which is more mumbo-jumbo for pretending that prices will climb over time.

Every powerful property player was being swept along in the property fantasy game. All the banks were waiting for Nama to rescue them. They refused to force any developers to pay back any money. They failed to take them to court. Bankers and developers agreed a standoff. Bankers did not want their money back.

The fantasy property game was all the rage until a few weeks ago when a foreign bank, ACCBank -- owned by Rabobank of the Netherlands -- lost the rag.

They told Liam Carroll, Ireland's largest developer, to pay up his €136m debt or they were going to make his Zoe group of companies insolvent. Not an unreasonable request. Normal banks want their money back.

No one joined ACCBank in its move against Carroll. Under the rules of fantasy property Irish banks do not ask developers for their money back. All the Irish banks sat on their hands and let ACCBank pursue the unique path of recovering its money.

ACCBank, alone, had not taken the magic mushrooms.

Liam Carroll and his Zoe team were high as kites. They headed down to the Four Courts in search of an examiner. They produced a bizarre property plan. Carroll's legal team told Judge Peter Kelly that his Zoe Developments was in the manure business -- but they had a plan. Zoe had debts of €1.2bn. His creditors had been very reasonable and were doing nothing to recover their money; but the very unreasonable, ACCBank alone wanted its money back.

Even AIB -- owed €489m -- was happy to hold off while Liam traded his way out of trouble. Liam's team told the judge that, under the fantasy plan, he would be out of the woods in three years' time with €300m in his pocket. At the same time all the banks would be repaid.

He may have fooled the bankers, but he did not fool the judge. Reports from the court suggest that last Tuesday his lordship blinked at the news.

Judge Peter Kelly's instinct must have been to give Carroll the breathing space he sought; but he seemed astounded by the business plan. No one wants to put Carroll and a few hundred others on the dole, but the judge had a responsibility not to pop the same magic mushrooms before nodding through the plan.

Judge Kelly was sceptical, talking about a "litany of incorrect evidence" presented by Carroll's team. It had exaggerated the number of job losses and the assets of one of the Carroll companies by €293m.

Peter Kelly rumbled the fantasy game. He called Carroll's group of companies "a maze, a spider's web". He pointed out that the developer's scheme involved "pouring" money into an already "grossly oversupplied" office space market at a time when the residential market was "flat as a pancake".

Clear evidence for this was the pitiful sale of Carroll's assets in recent months. He had only sold 39 flats in six months, a figure which is tantamount to closure for an operation of his scale.

His lordship knew that the plan was a non-runner. He also knew that if he allowed Carroll to go into liquidation, the market would be flooded with properties. He had to weigh up the prospects of survival under the plan or the painful reality of liquidation.

If the judge blinked at the plan he must have swallowed hard when he heard that part of Carroll's master strategy was to draw down an €8m loan from none other than Anglo Irish Bank. More fantastic still was the purpose of the loan: to complete the bankrupt bank's state-of-the-art new headquarters in Dublin's Docklands.

Activity at Anglo is at a standstill. Staff are twiddling their thumbs up at their Stephen's Green headquarters. In a short period of time the business of Anglo could be confined to the square footage of a telephone box.

Yet the men on the magic mushrooms are still pretending that a bankrupt bank should be lending millions to an insolvent builder for a headquarters they will never occupy.

On Friday afternoon Judge Peter Kelly refused the application for an examiner. The first sign of sanity was restored to the Nama game.

- Shane Ross