Daft Property - Irish Property News

Hard Times You know times are bad when you can overhear elderly ladies on the bus using phrases like “the current budget deficit,” as I did recently, on a pleasant autumn morning in Dublin. You know times are really bad when one of them just about knows the figure: “Oh, God, it’s 30 percent or something.” In fact, the Irish government’s deficit for 2010 hit 32 percent of GDP, more than 10 times the legal maximum for countries in the euro zone. It’s hard to find a parallel to such public excess anywhere in the Western world. The effects of our crisis are everywhere you look. The bus that morning was almost empty. Barely two years ago it would have been packed with Polish and Lithuanian hard hats, dressed in work boots and high-visibility jackets and heading for their construction jobs. Now many of the migrants have gone back home. Construction has halted, and much other work besides. Fine restaurants now offer three-course lunches for just €15. Newspaper lifestyle supplements are fu...

Ireland faces a tough road to economic recovery... LIMERICK , Ireland – Hard times. You took out a second mortgage to fix up the house. Then in 2008, Ireland's housing bubble burst. A year later, Dell Inc. closed its Limerick laptop factory, putting you and 2,000 others out of work. You're 58 and unemployed, and your home is financially underwater. Gerry Hinchy is fighting with Dell and his bank for better terms. But he knows the manufacturing work and the property boom are gone. "It won't come back. They can turn the screw in China for 50 cents an hour," he said. "What's done is done. The question now is how to get out of it." To overcome a decade of debt-driven growth, Ireland is gutting its way through one of the world's toughest austerity efforts. Economists here say Americans eventually will face the same belt-tightening to reduce the debts of government, businesses and consumers. The Irish say they could not wait. As one of 16 countries usi...

Fiscal ruin of the Western world beckons... For a glimpse of what awaits Britain, Europe, and America as budget deficits spiral to war-time levels, look at what is happening to the Irish welfare state... Events have already forced Premier Brian Cowen to carry out the harshest assault yet seen on the public services of a modern Western state. He has passed two emergency budgets to stop the deficit soaring to 15pc of GDP. They have not been enough. The expert An Bord Snip report said last week that Dublin must cut deeper, or risk a disastrous debt compound trap. A further 17,000 state jobs must go (equal to 1.25m in the US), though unemployment is already 12pc and heading for 16pc next year. Education must be cut 8pc. Scores of rural schools must close, and 6,900 teachers must go. "The attacks outlined in this report would represent an education disaster and light a short fuse on a social timebomb", said the Teachers Union of Ireland. Nobody is spared. Social welfare payments m...

...echoes of the 1930s Midwest in the sorry mortgage belt tales of our estate agents... "And there on the Texas plains right in the dead centre of the dust bowl, with the oil boom over and the wheat blowed out and the hard-working people just stumbling about, bothered with mortgages, debts, bills, sickness, worries of every blowing kind, I seen there was plenty to make up songs about. . ." Woody Guthrie IRELAND is increasingly becoming a 21st century mirror of America's Midwest in the 1930s , a region that became known as the Dust Bowl after a series of devastating droughts, windstorms and economic depression tore out its very soul. In Ireland today, however, we have no Woody Guthrie, no one to sing us through this mess, no one who can somehow lift us out of the worst of times. And who tells these tales of sorrow better than those in the Irish property market? Once the jewel in the Irish economic crown, it now lies forlorn, a victim not only of its own success but of the...

So why are we in this international economic crisis - it's no accident - it's been planned for some time. Meet the money masters... "The powers of financial capitalism had a far-reaching plan, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private ... all » hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole...Their secret is that they have annexed from governments, monarchies, and republics the power to create the world's money..." THE MONEY MASTERS is a non-fiction, historical documentary that traces the origins of the political power structure that rules our nation and the world today. The modern political power structure has its roots in the hidden manipulation and accumulation of gold and other forms of money. The development of fractional reserve banking practices in the 17th century brought to a cunning sophistication the secret techniques initially used by goldsmiths fraudulently to accumu...

The 'Fannie and Freddie' factor faces our banks too... If the two biggest American mortgage banks can go bust and be bailed out by the US government, could the same happen here? When the US government intervened to save Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae on Monday, it put the world on notice. We are now in a new era where our banks are the single biggest weakness in the economy and the State (meaning the taxpayer) will be expected to save them. The developments in America have serious implications for Ireland. If anything, our property boom was more ridiculous than that of the US. So the obvious question now is whether one of our banks might go bust. It could happen , but is it probable? We don't know; but if it wasn't a possibility, why has the share price of Irish banks fallen 60pc in the past year? The reason share prices have collapsed is that investors are afraid their money will disappear. Like the rest of us, they don't believe the banks' management. They have lo...