Daft Property - Irish Property News

Brian Lenihan tells the Irish bailout story on Radio 4... The inside story of Ireland's unprecedented economic bailout is revealed in Bailout Boys Go to Dublin, a new documentary on BBC Radio 4. In his first major interview since the last November's bailout, former Irish Finance Minister Brian Lenihan recalls his feelings as he prepared to sign up to the 85bn euro (£75bn) bailout - a deal which would end Ireland's economic sovereignty. "I have a very vivid memory of going to Brussels on the final Monday and being on my own at the airport and looking at the snow gradually thawing and thinking to myself: this is terrible. No Irish minister has ever had to do this before," he says. "I had fought for two and a half years to avoid this conclusion. I believed I had fought the good fight and taken every measure possible to delay such an eventuality and now hell was at the gates". Dan O'Brien, the economics editor of the Irish Times, tells the stor...

IT’S 3 a.m. at Doheny & Nesbitt, a favorite watering hole of Dublin’s political and business elite, and the property tycoon Sean Dunne stoops to retrieve a penny from the pub’s grimy floor. One would think that Mr. Dunne, Ireland’s best-known building developer, would be in bed at this hour. It’s a weeknight, after all, and he has meetings that begin before first light. What’s more, the Irish economy, pummeled by the most severe housing bust in Europe, has collapsed. And the gossip around town is that Mr. Dunne, whose brazen deal-making and Donald Trump-like lifestyle epitomized the country’s euphoric boom, might be going bankrupt. But, no matter, a penny is a penny. “I am never, never too proud to pick a penny up from the floor,” Mr. Dunne said. He is on perhaps his fifth pint of Guinness, capping a rollicking night of Champagne cocktails, followed by a wine-soaked dinner — yet his thick brogue is clear of even the faintest slurring. “I grew up with nothing and I know the value of...