Daft Property - Irish Property News

Call for inquiry into property bubble... An independent inquiry is needed into the Government’s failure to control the property bubble, a State-funded academic institution said today. In a scathing report, the National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis (Nirsa) also demanded a full investigation into charges of cronyism in the planning process. Furthermore, the body which examines how the country is developing, claimed the National Asset Management Agency (Nama) is a worrying organisation set up as part of a response to protect developers potentially at the expense of taxpayers. Professor Rob Kitchin, director of Nirsa, which is based in NUI Maynooth, said an inquiry into planning decisions and alleged close links between politicians and property speculators was necessary if the housing market was to recover. “An independent inquiry is needed to investigate all aspects of the planning system and its operation within and across different agencies and at all scales in Ireland in

IRELAND TODAY: IT’S JUST over a year since Wall Street and its Irish cheerleaders chanted “We are where we are” while Main Street reeled. Since then, every wrong-headed, populist Government economic policy, every catastrophic failure of the Financial Regulator, every rampantly greedy, short-termist instinct of the financial institutions and builders/developers has been exposed... A year ago, commentators were predicting something akin to the end of capitalism as we know it. Citizens were demanding humility, apologies, accountability, a purpose of amendment, radical reform, fewer tax breaks, an end to the bonus culture and a fairer share-out of the tax burden. So how is your head now, a year on? Still looking for other heads on plates? There is a lot to rage against. Only this week, headlines announced that banks are being “forced” to pay bonuses. But how long can a people sustain a condition of mass, impotent rage while remaining relatively sane and healthy? A few weeks ago, 1,200 peop

Cute hoor/fast buck gene to be removed from national herd... The Greens have done a complete about-turn and embraced genetic modification on a grand scale THE GREENS have embraced the concept of genetic modification, and with remarkable results. That’s a turn-up for the books. The party doesn’t do things by half measure. Their conversion isn’t down to some namby-pamby tinkering on the fringes of the allotment, or attempts to grow a pig from quorn. John Gormley, Eamon Ryan and their ecologically motivated Frankensteins have only gone and engineered a change to the basic genetic make-up of the Irish people. Using a secret procedure (which has been fully approved by their frightened partners in Government because they fear an agonising political death if they don’t), the party has succeeded in removing the cute hoor/fast buck gene from the national herd. “We’ve actually taken away that whole speculative impulse,” Eamon Ryan announced at a press conference yesterday. Thanks to new legislat

Vested interests: 38 politicians voting on Nama have extensive property portfolios... Almost 40 of the politicians who will vote on the critical Nama legislation designed to clean up the banks' toxic loans to property developers have extensive property interests both here and abroad themselves. The current register of interests, in which politicians are legally obliged to reveal any outside commercial interests, shows that, excluding the hundreds of acres of farmland owned by politicians, 38 TDs and senators have substantial development land and commercial property holdings. These range from the relatively modest three properties held by Taoiseach Brian Cowen, including one in Leeds, to Fine Gael's Alan Shatter, who lists joint ownership with an "other" of 14 investment properties in Dublin, London and Florida. Of the 38 politicians, 17 could be considered to have significant interests which, during the property boom, would have provided a comfortable income on their

A group of 46 economists has signed an article in today’s Irish Times calling on the Government to reconsider the National Asset Management (Nama) project. They argue that Nama should pay the banks only the current market value for the loans it will assume. In response, economist Alan Ahearne, special adviser to Minster for Finance Brian Lenihan, said last night that a number of claims in the article were incorrect. He added that most of the economists in the country had not signed the article drafted by Prof Brian Lucey of Trinity College. Prof Lucey said he had contacted about 250 lecturers in economics and not one had come back to say they disagreed with the views expressed in his draft. He said a number did not sign because they did not want to get involved in a round-robin exercise. In the article, the economists say the Government will pay significantly above market value for the bad loans advanced by the banks. “The key difficulty facing the Government is that to pay prices now

A nation in crisis, politicians invisible... POLL: Seventy-four per cent want Dail to be recalled immediately: The public is demanding that politicians come off holiday following the publication last week of the worst mid-summer economic data in living memory. Almost four months after the Government introduced an emergency Budget designed to stabilise the economy, exchequer figures show that the situation is getting perilously worse. Since that Budget on April 7, tax revenue has continued to decline at an alarming rate and current spending has continued to increase unchecked. The result is that the budget deficit has widened dramatically in a month, by almost €2bn, at a time when the Government had hoped it would reduce following its imposition of painful income and pension levies and tax increases. On top of that, Live Register figures, also published last week, show that almost 350 people a day are now losing their jobs . Politicians, meanwhile, are on holiday, with no intention of r

No Sniptoeing through the tulips for Brian's gang... Colm McCarthy was laid-back, but serving up his menu to a queasy public is going to strain Ministers’ stomachs... AFTER YEARS of high living, our political leaders arrived at the Café From Hell yesterday and were forced to confront a menu of the most foul and indigestible choices. The Taoiseach and his Ministers will have recoiled from the bill of fare, but they also know that if they don’t order and dispatch an ample sufficiency, the consequences for them and the rest of the country could be catastrophic. There’ll be no Sniptoeing through the tulips for Brian and the gang after the steaming mess of cuts that Colm McCarthy served up to their sophisticated noses. What’s worse, when they’ve properly perused what’s on offer, they’ll have to dish out McCarthy’s recommendations to an already queasy public. Will the Government have the stomach to do it? Brian Lenihan – the man who has to send out the plates – appealed for calm after th

The justice minister's declaration on national television that the budget is merely a statement of intent confirms our worst fear: they don't mean what they say. If only they'd told us before... Mystery solved. We now know why Dermot Ahern found nothing on Ray Burke when he was up every tree in north Dublin. It's because he wasn't actually looking. One day long, long ago, the taoiseach summoned him to his office and said "Dermot, I want you to carry out an exhaustive investigation to establish once and for all if Rambo's been on the take from the builders." "Righto, boss," said the future minister for justice, and off he scampered to fetch his climbing boots. But not a whiff of a brown envelope did he detect among the abundant sycamores and great oaks of Swords and Malahide. Why? Because he kept his eyes closed all the time he was looking. Well, if Humpty Dumpty was your boss, would you take his instructions literally? Even pedantic, pettifo

It was Samuel Johnson who famously proclaimed in 1775 that “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel”. What we have been witnessing has little to do with real patriotism — it is a phoney patriotism. In the circumstances, the more appropriate word is treason. THE US Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Senator Joe Biden, says raising taxes is patriotic. Speaking in a nationwide TV interview, he proclaimed: “It’s time to be patriotic.” Did the Yanks set the tone for this week’s budget? “This budget serves no vested interest,” Finance Minister Brian Lenihan told the Dáil on Tuesday. “It is no less than a call to patriotic action.” In fairness to Government ministers, they took a 10% cut in their salaries to give some example. Enda Kenny had called on all the politicians to cut their salaries. So the Government did give some example by cutting their own over-inflated salaries, but they offered little in the way of real leadership. People in a city who have a car park space provided