Daft Property - Irish Property News

In Oscar Wilde's Importance of Being Earnest, Lady Bracknell memorably remarks that: "To lose one parent… may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness." The Euro-zone's need to rescue three of its members (Greece, Ireland and Portugal) with three others (Spain, Belgium and Italy) increasingly eyed with varying degrees of concern smacks of institutionalised incompetence. Executed with Northern European creativity, charm, flexibility and humility and Mediterranean organisation, leadership diligence and appetite for hard work, the European rescue plan – "the grand compact" - is failing. European Debt Crisis returns In little over a year since the announcement of Greece's debt problems, the European debt crisis has ebbed and flowed with markets oscillating between euphoria (resolution) and despair (default or restructuring). The European Union's (EU) "confidence-boosting", short-term "liquidity enhancement...

European debt masters must study their part in our downfall... Stony-faced IMF and ECB officials touched down in Dublin yesterday as they make yet another attempt to solve the Irish banking crisis. This crisis is now almost three years old if you take the starting point to be the so-called 'St Patrick's Day massacre' of 2008 when Anglo Irish Bank's stock price plunged by 15pc. Despite plans to spend 36pc of everything Ireland produces on this one segment of the economy, all policy interventions to date have not only failed to shore up the system, but in some cases have made it even more unstable. While the primary responsibility for this failure must lie with our outgoing Government, wider culpability stretches in a southern direction to Brussels, then onward to Frankfurt. Last year economists Klaus Regling and Max Watson, in a key report, made it very clear the causes of Ireland's financial crisis were primarily homegrown, but deep involvement of European...

The creation of a European superstate has moved a step closer, after the Irish people voted to accept the Lisbon Treaty, paving the way for a powerful new President of Europe... Frightened for their jobs, no longer confident in their ability to govern themselves, the Irish finally surrender to Europe. But at least they were allowed a vote. So, out of the smog of dishonesty that has long concealed it, we at last see the true shape of the thing that threatens us. A great grey Tower of Babel reaches up into the sky over Europe, lopsided, full of cracks and likely to collapse in the fullness of time. But unlike the mythical original, it is complete – even though its builders neither understand nor particularly like each other. The new European State finally exists and has given itself life – life of a rather Frankenstein sort, but life all the same. It no longer needs to ask the permission of its member states to act. Ireland, for instance, will no longer be able even to hold a referendum ...

BBC panel discuss the ramifications of the passing of the $700 billion 'Bailout Bill' in the US, and the impact that will be felt in Europe and the Middle East...