Daft Property - Irish Property News

NOTHING BETTER encapsulates Ireland’s property crash than bleak images of “ghost estates”, which is why they have featured alongside the concrete skeleton of Anglo Irish Bank’s putative future headquarters in Dublin’s docklands in so much of the international media coverage of our current travails. What we must not forget, however, is that thousands of people are still suffering from the inevitable consequences of the crash, none more so than the residents of half-built housing estates abandoned by their once gung-ho developers when the bubble finally burst. Yet the feedback from many local authorities to the Department of the Environment indicated that “getting positive engagement from developers, site owners and financial institutions responsible for the loans on such developments was proving very difficult”, according to Minister of State for Housing and Planning Willie Penrose. As the final report of an advisory group set up to deal with this widespread problem made clear, “the...