Irish Election - Coverage of Irish Politics, News and Current Affairs

Last week I posted a survey of the first one hundred properties listed on Daft.ie for rent in Dublin, as taken from the Daft site on 30 November 2007. Below is a survey of the next one hundred properties taken on the same day. It shows that in two weeks: 17 out of 100 properties [...]

Swiss bank loses €6.8bn over subprime crisis

Property in Ireland – its sale and rental – is not just a social issue, it’s a political issue. And it is covered by journalists as a political issue. Recently we saw a highly publicised campaign by the Irish Times and the Irish Independent to see stamp duty cut. The argument was that stamp duty [...]

After the 2007 Budget last December, Brian Cowen was called Santa Claus by those quick witted subeditors eager to fill a snappy headline. After all, the surprisingly large tax returns, mainly provided by the rampantly inflated housing market allowed him to provide a bumper ‘giveaway’ budget. This year of course, with credit crunches and a [...]

While much of the media have been acting with glea and the other lot with denial there is a big issue that is being ignored. When ever I go home to my local to have a pint the conversation generally turns to construction. Now this is not a D4 type talk of interiors this conversation [...]

The Irish residential property market has now reached a turning point and already there are encouraging signs of a pick-up in activity, with sales enquiries through Hooke & MacDonald increasing steadily. This momentum will follow through into the autumn selling period, boosted by the resolution of the stamp duty issue and as the interest rate [...]

You may find it curious that at the moment the Irish Times is doing extensive coverage of Irish developers, those brave and assiduous men, and they are all men, who are bringing this country the type of shopping centres and office blocks that we could only have dreamed of when we sat watching Dallas in [...]

There has been much comment recently on the indebtedness of the nation such as Conor’s post on €1.3 TRILLION REASONS WHY IRELAND HAS AN OVERDRAFT FOR AN ECONOMY. On of the questions is how much of that debt is housing and how do we compare. Luckily someone else has done the work for me. Morgan [...]

Heads up to Random Walk for this one. And, ahem, McWilliams for the overdraft line. Ireland’s gross external debt increased by 262% under Fianna Fáil and the PDs, from around €521 billion in 2002, to over €1.36 trillion as of 30 June 2007. The gross external debt, according to the CSO, consists of “the gross [...]

The CSO figures released today show that planning permissions for the second quarter of this year are up 25%.  This is interesting as this was the time around the election where there was talk of a drop off in housing due to talks about stamp duty. It will be interesting to keep an eye on [...]

Economist anoraks will delight in all the data in the IMF’s latest assessment of the Irish economy.  The summary is here and the detailed report is here.   The report was written in July and so doesn’t cover the blow-up in credit markets since then.  But there’s a prescient observation about the banking system.

Conor made some interesting points on the nature of incentives to build houses pointing out the amount of empty houses that are in the country sighting. The national average for unoccupied housings is 12.1% – and it’s 15% when holiday homes are added into the picture. For example, there’s 45,000 empty housing units in Dublin [...]

This post arose out of a discussion with Simon on Michael Taft’s C’mon Ye Know-Nothings, (18 September 2007). Fianna Fáil has produced an abundance of tax incentives to aid the construction industry. One of these schemes, the Rural Renewal Scheme 1999 (PDF FILE, 887KB), is set to run until 31 July 2008. According to the [...]

… the mind of man becomes A thousand times more beautiful than the earth On which he dwells, above this frame of things (Which, ‘mid all revolution in the hopes And fears of men, doth still remain unchanged) In beauty exalted, as it is itself Of quality and fabric more divine. (Wordsworth. Prelude, 1805) People [...]

The ESRI/Permanent TSB survey on house prices has made for some interesting summer reading as it tracked a steady downward trend in house prices. Is this a slowdown or is it going to snowball into a meltdown? Well it seems that there is a drop in prices evident (in the region of €5,000 for new [...]

Speaking at the launch of the Merchants Quay Ireland 2006 report, Junior Minister for Drug Strategy Pat Carey suggested the government may look at implementing a needle exchange programme nationally. The programme seems prompted by the volume which the smaller Merchants Quay project deals with. Last year nearly 40,000 visits to the programme were logged [...]