Daft Property - Irish Property News

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

Bailout will total more than the EU ever gave us... Noonan says interest rate must be renegotiated by next government: THE €85bn IMF-EU bailout will come to more than the total amount of payments received since we joined Europe in 1973, the Sunday Independent can reveal. Fine Gael's Michael Noonan said yesterday that this stark fact showed why the interest rate levied on Ireland must be renegotiated and that any new government's hand will be strengthened by this revelation. In cash terms, Ireland has received €63.7bn from Europe in various agricultural, social and cohesion funding -- far less than the bailout forced on the Irish by Jean Claude Trichet's European Central Bank in late November. When those payments are adjusted for inflation, they total €99bn -- that is fractionally more than the total cost of the bailout when the penal interest rates are factored in. When Ireland's payments to Europe are subtracted, our net receipts from the EU budget amount t

THE country is facing crippling interest payments of €10 billion a year after the European Union and IMF agreed to an €85bn rescue package to fund the economy for the next three years. The bulk of the money, €50bn, will be used to pay for the day-to-day running of the country. The banks will receive €8bn immediately to restore their cash reserves; €2bn will be on standby and a further €25bn will be available if and when they need it. The money will come from the IMF, our Euro area partners and loans from Britain, Denmark and Sweden. In addition, the country has been told to take €12.5bn from the National Pension Reserve Fund and use €5bn the NTMA had already borrowed to pay for early 2011. The expected average interest rate for the bailout will be 5.83%. By 2013 the national debt is expected to rise above €200bn and by then almost a quarter of all taxes raised will be used to pay interest service costs. At the end of the term this is expected to have climbed to €9.66bn a year if the ba

And They're Off... The Hook Again... As the Nama smoke begins to clear, it is apparent developers deemed too big to fail are being bailed out just like the banks... Last week, there was the ritual sacrifice. Seán FitzPatrick "bowed to the inevitable" as he said himself, and petitioned to be declared a bankrupt. From here on in, if he is to enjoy any luxury in his life, it will be as a kept man. His wife, who never worked a day in Anglo Irish Bank, enjoys half a pension pot somewhere north of €3m. She is also part owner of a number of properties, which is just as well for the FitzPatricks, if they are to continue living in the style to which they have become accustomed. There is little sympathy for FitzPatrick. In a country where so many are struggling, he has become the pantomime villain. As a result, there was no way that Anglo Irish Bank was ever going to accept a private deal to settle his debts. The public would have been outraged. But what of all the rest? FitzPatric

Burden of Irish debt could yet eclipse that of Greece... OPINION: What will sink us, unfortunately but inevitably, are the huge costs of the September 2008 bank bailout... IT IS no longer a question of whether Ireland will go bust, but when. Unlike Greece, our woes do not stem from government debt, but instead from the government’s open-ended guarantee to cover the losses of the banking system out of its citizens’ wallets. Even under the most optimistic assumptions about government spending cuts and bank losses, by 2012 Ireland will have a worse ratio of debt to national income than the one that is sinking Greece. On the face of it, Ireland’s debt position does not appear catastrophic. At the start of the year, Ireland’s government debt was two- thirds of GDP: only half the Greek level. (The State also has financial assets equal to a quarter of GDP, but so do most governments, so we will focus on the total debt.) Because of the economic collapse here, the Government is adding to this d

Year of the great smash and grab raid -- by the banks... IF THERE is one thing you can bank on, it is that 2010 will go down as the year of the great bank robbery. Usually the raiders take money from the bank. But in the case of this bank job, the ones who have had their cash torn away from them in an audacious smash and grab raid are consumers. Banking was once a byword for trust, but today's Irish bankers are a sorry lot. They now have their hands out, begging for a bail-out. Unfortunately, we have no choice other than to stump up and fund their losses from lunatic loans that were advanced with abandon to developers and others during the boom. We are set to learn today exactly how many billions of euro will be required to be pumped into the banks in order to bring them back to health. But it is almost certain that the State will end up as the majority owner of AIB and Irish Nationwide, along with significant stakes in Bank of Ireland and EBS Building Society. And these banks and

Ireland’s share of an EU sponsored bailout of Greece would be between €200 million and €400 million, according to an exercise carried out for a European think tank. Open Europe, a broadly Eurosceptic think tank based in London, has estimated what each EU country would be required to pay if Greece was unable to refinance its debts, of which €20 billion to €25 billion will mature in the coming two months. Under a series of possible systems, it estimated that Ireland’s share of the bill would be between €227 million and €406 million. The broad range was accounted for by uncertainty of the size of the bailout and the system used for calculating the contribution. Open Europe said that meeting the cost of the bailout could be either spread among all members of the European Union or confined to those who used the euro as a currency. Ireland’s largest exposure - of about €400 million - would arise if only eurozone countries were required to pay. Under the system, Germany could be required to p

Names of top 10 borrowers in first wave of Nama transfers revealed... ANGLO IRISH Bank will transfer close to €10 billion in loans into the National Asset Management Agency (Nama), accounting for the largest amount owed by the top 10 developers moving to the agency in the coming weeks. The Irish Times has established the identities of the top borrowers being moved in the first wave of transfers to the State agency. They are developers Liam Carroll; Bernard McNamara; Sean Mulryan of Ballymore; financier Derek Quinlan; Paddy McKillen, owner of the Jervis Street Shopping Centre; Treasury Holdings, which is owned by Johnny Ronan and Richard Barrett; Cork developer Michael O’Flynn; Joe O’Reilly, the developer behind the Dundrum Shopping Centre in Dublin; Dublin builder Gerry Gannon, co-owner of the K Club golf resort in Co Kildare; and Galway businessman Gerry Barrett, owner of Ashford Castle in Co Mayo and G Hotel in Galway. More than €16 billion in loans linked to the top 10 are being mov