Daft Property - Irish Property News

'Returning to the spirit of Tiger Ireland is pointless. Only a completely new political movement can tackle the challenges'... DECLAN KIBERD : The UDC professor of English outlines what he believes needs to be done to fix Ireland NOBODY KNOWS what will happen next – not even our leaders. We walk as a community in darkness down a strangely unfamiliar road, into a new landscape for which there are no maps. Except, possibly, newspapers. Their sales may be in decline, but you can bet your life that more people are reading a newspaper, and in greater detail, every day. If you call into an office still lucky enough to be in business, you are likely to find people reading the morning paper. Four or five years ago, these readers would have been rushed off their feet with work to do and would have managed to glance at headlines only at the end of a fantastic day. The unwelcome increase in “free time” is but one reason for this heightened interest in current affairs. Another is the fact

Irish among most pessimistic in EU about economy - survey... IRISH PEOPLE are among the most pessimistic in Europe about the economic and employment situation in their country and most people expect the situation to be worse in 12 months’ time, new EU research suggests. Although the research also suggests that the Irish are among the most satisfied Europeans with the area they live in, contentment with the public administration is very low and the cost of living is a major source of unhappiness. In a report drawn up amid signs that the world’s worst recession since the 1930s may be bottoming out, the European Commission warns that the social consequences of the downturn may take months or even years to manifest themselves fully. Irish attitudes to the situation were gauged in a survey of 1,007 people in May and June last year, following months of bad economic news. Some 90 per cent of Irish respondents described the situation as bad, one of seven countries in which nine out of 10 peopl

Over 600 ghost estates stand as haunting legacy of crash... THE startling scale of Ireland's property crash is laid bare today as academics reveal that more than 600 'ghost' estates are scattered around the country. For the first time, a comprehensive map charts the locations of the empty and abandoned developments that stand as haunting monuments to the Celtic Tiger splurge . The analysis suggests pockets of the north-west and midlands will be worst hit by a housing glut that will take years to sell off. Largely rural counties Leitrim, Longford, Roscommon and Sligo have the highest number of partially built and semi-vacant housing estates when measured against their populations. Their relative distance from major cities is expected to compound their oversupply problem for the foreseeable future. Although Cork has 96 so-called 'ghost' estates and Dublin 58 -- the highest figures by county -- it is believed that their urban populations can absorb the surplus much soo

How do you solve a problem like Clongriffin? The bubble burst leaving the new north Dublin suburb in the lurch. Now designers and architects are figuring out what can be done to create a sense of community... SO WHAT do you do with a place that’s merely a fragment of what was planned? Clongriffin, on the north fringe of Dublin, was supposed to have a population of 30,000 to 40,000, with all the communal facilities they would need. But construction ground to a halt when the bubble burst, leaving the area’s residents high and dry. Enter Designing Dublin, a unique initiative by Design 21st Century, founded by Jean Byrne and Jim Dunne, who are both members of the Crafts Council of Ireland with backgrounds in business. Dunne was inspired by an exhibition at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art about how design could address current challenges. They brought in Vannesa Ahuactzin, a young American architect who did a year’s programme at the Institute Without Boundaries in Toronto, which spe

7 Reasons Why Ireland Will Be Left Behind... IRELAND POST-RECESSION: As the first signs of economic recovery are seen in the US, Ireland faces a glut of problems that could see the country left behind while the rest of the developed world returns to fiscal prosperity. LAST JUNE when Ben Bernanke thought he spied some green shoots of recovery in the US economy, another American economist, Nouriel Roubini, referred to them as yellow weeds, while Warren Buffet claimed not to have seen anything, even though he had just had cataracts removed from his eyes. In recent weeks there is more reason for optimism in the US and most commentators would be of the view that the US economy may show some modest growth in 2010, though the unemployment rate might be slow to come down. Because America is a relatively closed economy the robust fiscal stimulus and quantitative easing were bound to pay dividends. American recessions usually don't last much longer than a year. Some recovery in the same time

It's time to give Lisbon lies the red card... Michael O'Leary might be an obnoxious prat, but you have to give him credit for his hard neck. When Michael is trying to put one over he just looks you right in the eye and delivers his baloney with a wink and a smile. Perhaps experience has taught him that few are immune to his brand of leprechaun charm. "Hey, begob, sure 'tis only me, Mickey O -- pulling another fast one on ye, so I am!" If we're going to be smothered in bullshit in the weeks to come (and we are, dear reader, we bloody are), at least O'Leary's variety provides a degree of entertainment -- and we'll get to Mick's bullshit in a moment. There's a blizzard of the stuff headed our way, the intent being to leave us overwhelmed, jaded and ready to obediently swallow not one but two bitter pills prescribed by Mr Cowen's government. Nama is the bigger of the bitter pills -- it's approximately the size of a grand piano -- a mass

The elements that today might form a national culture – language, religion, nationalism – are no longer so readily identifiable here, where the effect of Tiger affluence was not individualism but conformism... THINGS ARE often studied only when they start to go wrong. The end of things is the moment when we start to understand them: and only when they are understood do we begin to realise what might be lost. For instance, sociology emerged as a discipline in that era when society was no longer felt to fit like a glove. Perhaps the fairly recent development of Irish Studies on campuses is less a cause for celebration than a warning: that the identities which it sponsored were, in effect, being codified before their possible eclipse. Such fears have, of course assailed Irish people long before now. After the defeat at Kinsale, the poets of the 1600s proclaimed the collapse of Gaelic Ireland, but in lines of such throbbing vitality as to rebut that very thesis. A tradition lived on in the

The Plans That Crashed To Earth... The Celtic Tiger has come and gone and the skyline of our capital city remains much the same. What happened to the skyscrapers that the 'starchitects' were supposed to bring... They were supposed to symbolise the new Ireland, a collection of skyscrapers and internationally renowned buildings that would illustrate to the world the global hub that the country, and in particular Dublin, had become. In the end, they were never built, with some left firmly at ground level as the economy crashed and the myth of Ireland's national wealth was exposed. In other cases, the planners decided against high rise, while a combination of An Bord Pleanála and significant opposition from well-to-do residents of areas like Ballsbridge has seen other plans turned down. This was Celtic Tiger Ireland and it was a new place, some of us said, with new ideas and a new way of looking of things. The housing boom had made most of us appear better off (even if it was

Rise and fall of the Tiger nouveau riche... NOW THAT we’re in an economic war zone, I’ve been thinking about the Economic War. As my family was a direct victim of that conflict, I was reared with a rather one-sided view of the times that went beyond the abstract account in history books... My great-grandfather retired from a successful medical career and bought land in Meath which he farmed profitably. He must have done well because my grandfather was educated privately in England and in a literal manifestation of his position in society there was even a family pew in the upstairs gallery of the rural parish church. All went well until Éamon de Valera, the most pernicious and malign figure in Irish history, in a fit of ideological insanity implemented a set of policies that cut off our country’s only export market – England – for our only product – food – and thus crippled Ireland’s economy and in the process permanently ruined that class of people to which the now poor Dr Carey belong

Learning from the credit crunch. NEXT MONTH marks the second anniversary of the “credit crunch”, the global financial crisis which has led to the worst economic downturn Ireland has experienced in a century... However, these experiences can be put to good use by informing future investment decisions. While the most obvious lesson to be learnt from the crisis is that nothing is certain and anything is possible – who could have predicted that Anglo would be nationalised – there are basic investment fundamentals that got lost during the boom years that should be borne in mind. 1 Diversify, diversify, diversify: Diversification, whereby you spread your investments across asset types, industries and economies, is a fundamental investment technique aimed at reducing risk and increasing long-term returns. During the celtic tiger, when Irish property prices soared and bank stocks led the Iseq to boom, investors were loath to spread their investments away from the Irish economy. That has resul

Life for the boom's dead spaces... The Irish landscape is scarred with the remnants of failed or unfinished building schemes from the Celtic Tiger years. GEMMA TIPTON asks some leading architects to use their imaginations and suggest ways to put them to some use. EVEN DURING THE boom, it was difficult to see some of the things we were building and imagine them as a success. Enormous luxury golf and spa hotels in the middle of nowhere, shoe-box apartment blocks in small towns, ghost estates where no houses were ever sold , and massive out-of-town retail and industrial parks – all these have blighted the landscape, and now stand in various stages of construction or dereliction, mocking us with the question: what should we do with them? Some ways out of such waste have already been proposed: turning the hotels into nursing homes is one example. Or we could look to SoHo in New York, where inner-city factories and warehouses became, first, artists’ studios and then ultra-desirable loft

We're gripped by collective stupefaction... We need more than a changing of the political guard...We need to take the axe to the nation's greedy elite WHEN the last of the Celtic Tiger cubs are basting in the St Stephen's Green sunshine like Sunday afternoon cooked chickens, it is hard to think revolutionary thoughts. Sadly, even as we noted that a government which has turned our economy into the Cuba of Europe could be forgiven if it did the same trick with the weather, the antics of our judges and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) swiftly brought us back to more normal dreams about the virtues of Jonathan Swift's wise suggestion that we should hang half a dozen bankers every year. While the hanging bit is a tad excessive, when it comes to numbers Mr Swift may actually have been too prescriptive -- for any bonfire of our Tiger nonentities should include a right good sprinkling of politicians, clerics, regulators, barristers, mandarins and social partners. Last week