Daft Property - Irish Property News

Recession: the bad luck of the Irish... It was once hailed as the best place to live in the world. Now it’s in the grip of a terrifying economic storm. Could Ireland be the first euro country to go bust? In Ireland, the biggest funerals take place in the smallest churches. St Mochta’s, on Dublin’s western fringes, is little bigger than a front room. So many mourners turned up for the funeral of Patrick Rocca that they spilt out onto the pavement. Anyone who is anyone in modern Ireland was there, huddled together under a sky the colour of a day-old bruise. Politicians, pop stars, billionaire developers, horsemen and the sporting elite. Even the paparazzi. Rocca would have liked that. The 42-year-old was the self-styled poster boy for the new, resurgent Ireland, with a glamorous wife, private planes and helicopters, and a property business worth, at its peak in 2007, €450m. But one morning in January, he snapped. The first sign that anything was wrong was when neighbours saw him walking

European journalists deliver the last rites to Celtic Tiger... EUROPEAN DIARY : European media outlets have been scathing in their criticism of a ‘Wild West’ financial culture ... THE CRISIS gripping the Irish economy is clearly the big news at home this week. But it is also hard to avoid the topic in Brussels, where journalists and diplomats are busy reading the last rites to the Celtic Tiger and rethinking their past praise for the Irish economic miracle. In the European Commission press room, colleagues from other EU states tend to broach the subject in one of two ways. Over a cup of coffee some ask concerned questions about what went wrong, who is to blame and what impact it will have on a second referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. Others invoke gallows humour, telling the in-joke: “What’s the difference between Iceland and Ireland? Answer: One letter and about six months.” The BBC’s daily current affairs programme Europe Today repeated this – by now hackneyed – joke on air on Friday