Daft Property - Irish Property News

‘Hope to be bankrupt for Christmas’: Irish mortgage debtors see insolvency as way out... With one in five mortgage payments being overdue in Ireland and families across the country having their homes repossessed, some of the debtors are hoping for bankruptcy to do away with their endless fear of losing their properties. Julia Godsill, a Dubliner, can hardly hold back her tears, when retelling her not uncommon mortgage saga to RT’s Tesa Arcilla. When she bought her house the Irish economy was still the “Celtic Tiger” enjoying its boom time. After the credit crunch of 2008, Julia could only watch as her mortgage became too high for her to be able to pay, while the value of her house itself went down. “I ended up with a cash offer for 500,000. This was in 2011. And I was delighted. But the banks refused to accept the offer because the mortgage was 800,000 climbing with arrears. They preferred to bring me to court, and repossess the house instead.” The Central Bank of Ireland figu...

The Metro is an insane idea -- and a disaster for Dublin... We've been bombarded with cataclysmic figures for the past two years, all of which related to financial obligations caused by our past blunders. Many of you were clearly unaware that the Metro represents an entirely voluntary leap into a fresh and cataclysmic debt that could bring disaster to Dublin. Now, no one would back a plan to build a huge coal-fired power station that had been conceived before global warming. So why is this technically bankrupt State hoping to build an underground rail link from St Stephen's Green to Dublin Airport which was conceived before the financial meltdown? We are borrowing €20bn a year merely to run the State and to pay civil servants' salaries and pensions. And yet we still propose to build the Metro? This is not rational behaviour, but akin to the conduct of an alcoholic who has foresworn alcohol totally -- apart, that is, from the open-ended credit-card account with Tesco wines, ...

Selling off state assets on the cheap is just madness... This Government will not contemplate selling property just in case it would bankrupt the banks. The State's argument is that the market is depressed so if we were to sell the land, we would not get a fair price for it. So we will postpone the problem: we get NAMA -- a financial skip into which the banks throw their worthless mistakes -- and you pay. The logic of NAMA and this Government's central strategy is to wait for the value of land to improve before selling. Whether you agree with it or not, this is their logic. It can be summed up by: "Don't sell land in a depressed market." Yet at the same time, the Government has just announced that it will sell real assets via privatisation in a similarly depressed market. So why can it sell ESB -- a real company with real assets -- and not a field in Athlone which is worthless and should command the price a farmer would pay you to put a donkey grazing on it? Why i...

This time of crisis affords us great opportunity to redefine ourselves... The vision of our leaders is bankrupt. Now is the time to change our political culture IN TIMES of crisis, more than any other time, we need our politicians to provide leadership and clarity so we can make some sense of what we should be doing as citizens. In our current malaise we are still waiting for them and our public and corporate leaders to empower us with ideas so that we may reimagine our new Republic. It is a time of trauma and also of great opportunity and the need to correct this for the next generation should be a priority. What has been evident is that our artists, writers, thinkers, philosophers and (some) economists have been suggesting alternatives and a way of thinking afresh. I’m not suggesting that these new ideas will make us financially solvent again but in the absence of a dynamic political leadership, it is as good a place to start as any. It will, at the very least, replenish our idealism...