Daft Property - Irish Property News

Until we see some real green shoots, praying to a tree stump may be the next best thing... It's a miracle. It's a sign from above in bad times. It's a tree stump. It all depends on where you stand, how you view the tree stump in the churchyard in Rathkeale, County Limerick. People from all over the country have been coming to pray at the stump, in which they perceive an image of the Virgin Mary. Workmen removing old trees from the grounds of the Holy Mary Parish Church, having sawn away the upper part of the tree, noticed that the leftover stump had an unusual shape. They believed it looked like the Virgin Mary. The parish priest could have seen this as a great opportunity to revive the faith, but instead, he talked commonsense. "There's nothing there," he said crisply "It's just a tree. You can't worship a tree." God help him, he's fighting an uphill battle, as local teenagers line up in the Church in the evenings to say the Rosary in a

Take a long look at the chart below. Digest it. Maybe look again if you have to. This happened in the most sophisticated economy in the world. This is what happened to the price of development land in Japan. Prices roared upwards and then collapsed, ending up below where they started at the beginning at the boom. This is likely to happen here; development land is likely to settle back to 1996 prices. We haven’t seen the half of it yet . When we hear some property lads talking about green shoots, this chart should be enough to tell them to snap out of it. But we can’t seem to snap out of it. We are still caught in the trap. We seem to believe that the price of houses and land will miraculously rise again some time soon. This will not happen. It can’t and shouldn’t. In fact, houses prices are likely to fall another 50 per cent from here before we see anything like the bottom. International comparisons bear out these forecasts. Until now, many Irish people have clung to the myth of what