Daft Property - Irish Property News

Cuts, tax and emigration the harshest medicine... IT'S often been said that the best cure for poverty and unemployment is a job. But the reality of the modern Irish economy is that the best cure is emigration. The Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) said yesterday that 100,000 people would leave Ireland this year and next, keeping a lid on already high unemployment and helping to relieve some of the budgetary pressures on the Government. The loss of 100,000 mainly young people is hardly something to celebrate, but the reality is that without this safety valve the Irish economy would be mired in levels of unemployment last witnessed in the 1980s. The ESRI calculated yesterday that if the amount of people in the labour market had not fallen over the last year via emigration, the rate of unemployment would be about 16pc not the current 13.4pc. Ireland is shipping out its young people to countries like Canada, the US, Australia and the UK, thereby easing the pressure on the e

Collapse in house prices will be good for economy... Many people in recent weeks have tried to explain what is happening to the economy. How can we visualise why credit has dried up? How do we rationalise the fact that we went from a situation of so much money we didn't know what to do with it, to a situation of no cash at all? Where did it all go? One interesting way to look at this, and this column has used it before, is to think of events in the natural world. Think of the aerial photos of the Serengeti at the beginning of the annual rainy season. What was a parched arid climate where nothing grows suddenly become florid, verdant and full of life. Animals, flowers insects flourish and the place is abuzz. We see migrating wildebeest, crocs and birds and then, at the height of the season, the whole plain is crackling with energy, fuelled by that most precious of commodities, water. Then as the seasons change, the water begins to evaporate. Life disappears from the edges of the pla

IRELAND had the fourth biggest fall in house prices in the world this year ... Only Estonia, the US and Latvia have been harder hit by the drop in property values, a study by research group Global Property Guide shows. House prices in Ireland fell by 9.6pc in the year to June, according to the index. But when the level of inflation is taken into account, the drop was 13.9pc . The compilers of the index point out that "in Ireland, the 2009 Budget will include a 'stimulus package' helping first-time homebuyers". Latvia recorded the biggest fall in prices, after inflation was taken into account, with a 33pc drop. In the US, the inflation-adjusted fall for the year to June was 19pc. A host of European countries have recorded much smaller falls in house prices than Ireland. In Britain, the inflation-adjusted drop was nearly 10pc and Portugal recorded a fall of 8pc. Spain, which is now experiencing a sharp construction slowdown, recorded an inflation-adjusted decline of 2.