Daft Property - Irish Property News

How the great Irish fairy tale hides the true horror story... Gene Kerrigan's new book presents an alternative view of the economic crisis, suggesting that some people are actually benefiting from austerity policies. We've been subjected to the Big Lie. We are not all in this together, as this extract reveals By now, they can recite the fairy tale in their sleep. Politicians, their media fans, tame economists and hired mouthpieces use the fairy tale to explain what happened. Like all stories, the details can be changed from time to time, but the basic fairy tale about the Celtic Bubble, the crash and the recession is pretty consistent. And it goes like this. Once upon a time, the Irish people threw off the shackles of the past that held us back. We began to work hard, to innovate, to find within us the talents we always had but which had been suppressed or neglected for too long. In the bad old days, you see, the Brits held us back, or perhaps the Catholic Church sti

No magic bullet for banks' property crisis... It is going to take more than a decade to unwind the excess property assets financed by the banks during the noughties THE BANKS in Ireland, including IBRC and Nama, have more than €30 billion of Irish loans relating to property which they need to unwind over the next five to seven years in order to meet the Basel capital adequacy requirements and also repay the temporary ECB loan support. This unwinding process has started by the sale of overseas assets and loan books but is mainly outstanding in Ireland. Can this deleverage be achieved? What will be the timescale and what will be the nature of the property market during the process? Should the Government provide further help to the industry? These are key questions for all close to the banking and property industries. In a comprehensive discussion note* I have tried to join the dots of the many intertwining factors. I have drawn on two recent studies on the overall European property

HOUSE prices will keep falling for another two years and not bottom out until at least 2013, when the average price will have fallen by 60pc to €150,000. The latest prediction comes as National Irish Bank said it would raise its variable rates by up to 0.95pc next month. However, there are renewed hopes that the European Central Bank will signal a cut in eurozone interest rates when it meets tomorrow. A cut in ECB rates may help the collapsing housing market. Ireland is currently experiencing the most violent property crash in the western world. Over the last four years, prices have fallen by 45pc to leave the average asking price at €194,000, according to the latest Daft.ie house-price index. The Central Statistics Office puts the fall from peak at 43pc. Now it has been predicted that prices are set to fall for another two years with the average asking price to hit €150,000 before the market bottoms out, according to research by housing economist Ronan Lyons of Daft. Mr

Write-offs and negative-equity loans already on offer -- just don't tell everyone The debate about debt forgiveness has raged across the nation, polarising public opinion. Laura Noonan investigates what banks are really doing to help struggling homeowners. It might surprise people to know that some banks have been embarking on forms of mortgage write-offs for quite some time. And that's not all that's been going on -- some of the other new-fangled "solutions" expected to be recommended by the Government's latest mortgage expert group, like negative-equity mortgages, are already in action, too. The reason the public don't know about these developments is simple -- the banks don't want the masses to know. Because as soon as you admit things like this are happening, you run the risk that everyone will want a piece of the action. The action so far has largely been limited to borrowers who've actually left their home by way of "volu

Mortgage rescue deal could cost you up to €50,000... But it is still only option for thousands. STRUGGLING homeowners who make deals with lenders to reduce their mortgage payments face paying tens of thousands of euro in extra interest charges. New figures show that almost 70,000 people have now restructured their mortgages -- mostly by extending the repayment period or switching to 'interest only' payments. The Irish Independent can reveal that those with a typical €200,000 home loan who extend their mortgage term by just five years face paying €34,000 more in interest charges. And borrowers could end up paying more than €50,000 in extra interest for the same €200,000 mortgage. The startling figures have been produced by personal finance expert Brendan Burgess. They reveal the huge long-term costs for families seeking to ease the burden. But the Central Bank, which has been leading the way on policies to ease the mortgage crisis, admitted it had "no figures&qu

Euro crisis to freeze mortgage rate for year... HOMEOWNERS will be spared mortgage increases for up to a year -- but face heavy losses in the value of their pensions as markets plunged all over the world. The deepening euro crisis means interest rates are unlikely to rise for another year -- a reprieve for those on tracker mortgages. But the short-term relief could be seriously offset by the decline in the value of pensions and investments. They were worth hundreds of billions less after all the main European markets crashed by between 3pc and 4pc. US markets also closed well down - at 4.8pc - last night. And there are fears even more losses could pile up later today. The European Central Bank (ECB) left its key interest rate unchanged and gave no signal of an imminent rise at its monthly meeting in Frankfurt. Markets reacted by betting there would now be no further rate rise until well into 2013 -- as the euro crisis means the ECB cannot raise rates due to the fragile

In Oscar Wilde's Importance of Being Earnest, Lady Bracknell memorably remarks that: "To lose one parent… may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness." The Euro-zone's need to rescue three of its members (Greece, Ireland and Portugal) with three others (Spain, Belgium and Italy) increasingly eyed with varying degrees of concern smacks of institutionalised incompetence. Executed with Northern European creativity, charm, flexibility and humility and Mediterranean organisation, leadership diligence and appetite for hard work, the European rescue plan – "the grand compact" - is failing. European Debt Crisis returns In little over a year since the announcement of Greece's debt problems, the European debt crisis has ebbed and flowed with markets oscillating between euphoria (resolution) and despair (default or restructuring). The European Union's (EU) "confidence-boosting", short-term "liquidity enhancement&

Ireland's future depends on breaking free from bailout... OPINION: Ireland is heading for bankruptcy, which would be catastrophic for a country that trades on its reputation as a safe place to do business. WITH THE Irish Government on track to owe a quarter of a trillion euro by 2014, a prolonged and chaotic national bankruptcy is becoming inevitable. By the time the dust settles, Ireland’s last remaining asset, its reputation as a safe place from which to conduct business, will have been destroyed. Ireland is facing economic ruin. While most people would trace our ruin to to the bank guarantee of September 2008, the real error was in sticking with the guarantee long after it had become clear that the bank losses were insupportable. Brian Lenihan’s original decision to guarantee most of the bonds of Irish banks was a mistake, but a mistake so obvious and so ridiculous that it could easily have been reversed. The ideal time to have reversed the bank guarantee was a few month

Eurozone growing ever more fragile... THE EU united last night in its denials of reports that Greece was preparing to leave the eurozone. These ranged from the EU Commission to the German government to the Greek finance ministry itself. Other governments across the 17-member currency union were also prepared to dismiss the report. Yet the mere hint of such a move was enough to push the single currency down almost 1.5pc -- its biggest drop against the dollar in a year. The report, carried in the German magazine 'Der Spiegel', suggested the Greeks were looking to leave the euro because their debts had become unsustainable. The fact that a leading and reputable German news magazine could suggest such an eventuality simply highlights just how fragile the eurozone has become. It also highlights just how inadequate the European response has been to this economic crisis which began in January 2010. The European approach has been to place a sticking plaster over the problem -- an

The Government, the EU and a great swindle... In a massive shafting of the Irish people, our own leaders and those in Europe threw away our democracy. Let's play a simple game. Let's put together three stories that emerged last week. And when we do this we will see, more clearly than ever, that we were royally screwed, that we are victims of one of the biggest stitch-ups perpetrated on a country since the heyday of colonialism in Africa. We were stitched up by an unholy alliance of our own Government and autonomous undemocratic institutions within the EU, who seem to be answerable to no one, and other institutions within the EU that are supposed to be answerable to us. Each of these stories, if you read them, will have angered and astounded you. But put the three of them together and you will be fit to be tied. Again. The great swindle begins with the European Commission. You probably don't know exactly what the European Commission is. You are vaguely aware that it

Brian Lenihan tells the Irish bailout story on Radio 4... The inside story of Ireland's unprecedented economic bailout is revealed in Bailout Boys Go to Dublin, a new documentary on BBC Radio 4. In his first major interview since the last November's bailout, former Irish Finance Minister Brian Lenihan recalls his feelings as he prepared to sign up to the 85bn euro (£75bn) bailout - a deal which would end Ireland's economic sovereignty. "I have a very vivid memory of going to Brussels on the final Monday and being on my own at the airport and looking at the snow gradually thawing and thinking to myself: this is terrible. No Irish minister has ever had to do this before," he says. "I had fought for two and a half years to avoid this conclusion. I believed I had fought the good fight and taken every measure possible to delay such an eventuality and now hell was at the gates". Dan O'Brien, the economics editor of the Irish Times, tells the stor

Only a miracle can save financial system from complete meltdown... MICHAEL Noonan talks the talk, but last Wednesday the only walking he did was backwards. It confirms that the EU is running the show. The light we saw flicker at the end of the tunnel has been blown out and is unlikely to be rekindled any time soon. The new Government had an opportunity to deliver on its election promises. It failed abysmally on one of the key issues. It didn't renegotiate the EU/IMF deal to withhold repayments to the senior bondholders, as promised. It might have been shot down in flames had it persisted with this approach. But it would have preserved its credibility at home. Its proposed bank reorganisation is a whitewash, and only intended to distract us from the cover-up of what is going on at the highest level in Europe. This is not totally unexpected, but it is very disappointing. Weeks before the general election Pat Rabbitte and Simon Coveney said, on separate occasions, that protectin

European debt masters must study their part in our downfall... Stony-faced IMF and ECB officials touched down in Dublin yesterday as they make yet another attempt to solve the Irish banking crisis. This crisis is now almost three years old if you take the starting point to be the so-called 'St Patrick's Day massacre' of 2008 when Anglo Irish Bank's stock price plunged by 15pc. Despite plans to spend 36pc of everything Ireland produces on this one segment of the economy, all policy interventions to date have not only failed to shore up the system, but in some cases have made it even more unstable. While the primary responsibility for this failure must lie with our outgoing Government, wider culpability stretches in a southern direction to Brussels, then onward to Frankfurt. Last year economists Klaus Regling and Max Watson, in a key report, made it very clear the causes of Ireland's financial crisis were primarily homegrown, but deep involvement of European

The ECB has no love for Ireland and is seeking to punish us. That's why we should tell it where to go... When the new government settles into their new offices in the next few weeks, many many problems await them. None more so than Ireland's by now fractious relationship with Europe and in particular the European Central Bank (ECB). In truth, Ireland's relationship with the ECB has become so dysfunctional that it now verges on abusive, and Ireland is the one being beaten, and beaten hard. Jean Claude Trichet on his €344,000 plus a year salary and his cronies have no love for Ireland at the minute and despite all the talk of it lending us €150bn to keep our banks afloat, any sensible person would know that is out of its own self interest and not out of any great affection for our small little island. The ECB's role in Ireland's financial crisis was by anybody's standard dubious at best, and criminal at worst. During the boom years of 2004 to 2008, the E