Daft Property - Irish Property News

Property investor... The Government’s €500 million plan to provide mortgages to those turned down by the banks is a failure.... A PLAN, sponsored by the Government, to make it easier for first-time buyers to get mortgages has flopped because of stringent qualifying conditions and needless bureaucracy. Towards the end of 2008, when the mortgage market began to dry up because of the banking crisis, the Department of the Environment was portrayed as rushing to the rescue of young workers unable to get funding from the banks and building societies. The €500 million mortgage plan announced by Minister for the Environment John Gormley was seen as a serious alternative for those anxious to get on the property ladder. The grand plan, promoted as the Home Choice Loan, has turned out to be a “No Choice Loan”. The difficulties in complying with the terms has meant that, almost 18 months after the launch of the scheme, only three people in the entire country have managed to draw down mortgages (ea

Ireland’s choice: €4bn in cuts or IMF... THE Government has raised the spectre of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) coming in to run the country if people don’t accept the savage €4 billion of cuts to be imposed in the December budget. Taoiseach Brian Cowen and his Cabinet colleagues have launched a PR offensive to soften people up for the cutbacks, saying the black hole in the public finances was unsustainable . Mr Cowen said everybody would have to make a contribution to help solve the crisis "according to their means". Finance Minister Brian Lenihan said Ireland would face "ruin" if action wasn’t taken to get the national debt under control . Green Party leader and Environment Minister John Gormley said there was no point misleading people about how difficult the budget would be. And Health Minister Mary Harney warned that if the Government didn’t take the necessary tough decisions, the IMF would do so instead. "We’re currently spending €500m a week more

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

Irish use of resources not sustainable, says Gormley... IRISH PEOPLE are "living beyond our environmental means" and are using too much of the planet's resources, Minister for the Environment John Gormley will tell a sustainable development conference today. Mr Gormley was referring to a recent report commissioned by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) which found that if everyone in the world consumed as much as an Irish person, three planets would be needed to sustain the world's population. The report also found that meeting policy targets in relation to the reduction of the State's "ecological footprint" would not be enough to live within the capacity of global resources. Speaking ahead of his address to the annual conference in Dublin today of Comhar, the sustainable development council, Mr Gormley said Ireland must rein in its consumption of resources. " We are living beyond our environmental means. If everybody in the world consumed as