Daft Property - Irish Property News

A POETICALLY-titled report, A Haunted Landscape: Housing and Ghost Estates in Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland , estimated last July that there were more than 620 such estates where over half of all the houses were either empty or unfinished – exceeding 300,000 units in all. Now we are being told by the Department of the Environment, following an on-the-ground survey of over 2,800 developments, that the phenomenon is not quite so widespread. Of the total of 180,000 houses or apartments involved, 77,000 were found to be occupied, 33,000 were completed and vacant, 10,000 were at varying stages of construction and the remaining 60,000 were not started at all; further building plans had obviously been abandoned as the property bubble burst. The photograph in yesterday’s editions of two children playing on a “street” in Co Cork with everything unfinished around them shows that there are are real victims of this “legacy issue”. The degraded environment of such estates, with their unpaved footpaths