Niccolo and Donkey
02-21-2009, 07:53 PM
Prosperity just a blip for old Ireland (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/070873bc-ff7d-11dd-b3f8-000077b07658.html)
FT.com
Matthew Engel
February 21, 2009
The most improbable headline of the week in Ireland – perhaps in all Europe – came in the Meath Chronicle. It was so startling, one had to check the date on the newspaper to make sure it wasn’t left over from February 2007, or last April 1. “House-buying frenzy in Johnstown,” it said.
Johnstown is just outside Navan, 30 miles from Dublin. It’s a commuter exurb of dreary looking new estates, though it became practically inner-city as Dublin property prices exploded in the early 2000s. Young families had to move farther and farther to find something affordable, committing themselves to a grim life of hefty repayments, lengthy commutes and kids in crèches.
The market has changed: one Navan estate agent told me he hadn’t sold a house in months. So the desperate developers of one estate, Athlumney Wood, did what practically every retailer in Ireland is doing: they held a sale and slashed prices by half. Last week they got rid of 25 properties. Semi-detached houses that once touched €330,000 ($416,000, £291,000) sold for €175,000.
This was not good news for the poor saps who bought high. But perhaps one difference between Ireland’s crash and everyone else’s is that here cheerfulness has a habit of breaking through the clouds. The Irish are used to being put-upon; prosperity was just a brief blip.
“Oh, well,” said one Athlumney Wood resident, taxi driver Stephen Byrne, “win some, lose some. I’ll get it back some time. I have to be an optimist in my job. I get enough doom and gloom listening to people all day.” His neighbour Davitt Ward has been trying to sell since August. He shrugged, too: “The way I see it, the less this is worth, the less I’ll have to pay for a new one.”
Unlike anyone else’s, the Irish boom was essentially construction-led, and places like Athlumney Wood are the new Ireland. And sometimes it seems as though the old Ireland has gone completely. The bars are smoke-free and sanitised and increasingly deserted. The churches are scandal-stained, and also increasingly deserted. In Dublin, people seem as brittle and bad-tempered as in London. The papers are filled with crime stories. But maybe there are a few smiles left.
Politically, as well as financially, the similarities between Britain and Ireland are eerie. The same party has been in power for 12 years. The boom came under a glib, long-serving, ideology-free leader (Tony Blair/Bertie Ahern); the scruffy and ponderous finance minister (Gordon Brown/Brian Cowen) has taken over to preside over the bust and probable electoral disaster.
But in Ireland the transition has been far more theatrical. No one in Britain ever gloated, as Mr Ahern once did: “The boom is getting boomier.” And there is no symbol of change quite as stark as the empty block in the Dublin district of Ballsbridge with stickers on all its windows spelling out “SOS”.
Developer Sean Dunne planned to tear it down, along with everything else nearby, to build a “soaring Dubai-like diamond-shaped office tower”. This fantasy was finally scuppered the other week by a local planning board. Looking round this once-green country, one never knew it possessed such bodies.
Mr Dunne gave a notorious 3am pub interview to The New York Times last month, admitting he was close to insolvent but proclaiming defiance. He is seen as the epitome of the “cute hoors”, the deal-makers, duckers and divers who dominated the Ahern years.
Indeed, it’s easy to believe that the cute-hoor party, covering politicians, builders, financiers, bankers, senior civil servants and every chancer in Christendom, has been running the place for their own benefit for years. Here, everyone who matters knows everyone else.
But careful observers are more specific in their analysis. “There was an alliance between Fianna Fáil and the property developers,” says Jane Suiter, who teaches politics at Trinity College, Dublin. “The government saw light-touch regulation as giving Ireland competitive advantage. And as far as Ahern was concerned, the biggest multiplier for votes was construction jobs.”
Even Paddy Prendiville, editor of the satirical magazine The Phoenix, does not quite buy the wholesale conspiracy theory. “We’re a suspicious lot in this place,” he says. “We don’t trust anyone who rules and we presume they’re all at it.
“But you’ve got to remember that Ireland has never known prosperity like the past 10 to 15 years, ever. New money is always cruder and there is a certain gaucheness over here.”
Has Ireland been more corrupt than anywhere else? “I think we’re a bit more obvious and less practised.”
FT.com
Matthew Engel
February 21, 2009
The most improbable headline of the week in Ireland – perhaps in all Europe – came in the Meath Chronicle. It was so startling, one had to check the date on the newspaper to make sure it wasn’t left over from February 2007, or last April 1. “House-buying frenzy in Johnstown,” it said.
Johnstown is just outside Navan, 30 miles from Dublin. It’s a commuter exurb of dreary looking new estates, though it became practically inner-city as Dublin property prices exploded in the early 2000s. Young families had to move farther and farther to find something affordable, committing themselves to a grim life of hefty repayments, lengthy commutes and kids in crèches.
The market has changed: one Navan estate agent told me he hadn’t sold a house in months. So the desperate developers of one estate, Athlumney Wood, did what practically every retailer in Ireland is doing: they held a sale and slashed prices by half. Last week they got rid of 25 properties. Semi-detached houses that once touched €330,000 ($416,000, £291,000) sold for €175,000.
This was not good news for the poor saps who bought high. But perhaps one difference between Ireland’s crash and everyone else’s is that here cheerfulness has a habit of breaking through the clouds. The Irish are used to being put-upon; prosperity was just a brief blip.
“Oh, well,” said one Athlumney Wood resident, taxi driver Stephen Byrne, “win some, lose some. I’ll get it back some time. I have to be an optimist in my job. I get enough doom and gloom listening to people all day.” His neighbour Davitt Ward has been trying to sell since August. He shrugged, too: “The way I see it, the less this is worth, the less I’ll have to pay for a new one.”
Unlike anyone else’s, the Irish boom was essentially construction-led, and places like Athlumney Wood are the new Ireland. And sometimes it seems as though the old Ireland has gone completely. The bars are smoke-free and sanitised and increasingly deserted. The churches are scandal-stained, and also increasingly deserted. In Dublin, people seem as brittle and bad-tempered as in London. The papers are filled with crime stories. But maybe there are a few smiles left.
Politically, as well as financially, the similarities between Britain and Ireland are eerie. The same party has been in power for 12 years. The boom came under a glib, long-serving, ideology-free leader (Tony Blair/Bertie Ahern); the scruffy and ponderous finance minister (Gordon Brown/Brian Cowen) has taken over to preside over the bust and probable electoral disaster.
But in Ireland the transition has been far more theatrical. No one in Britain ever gloated, as Mr Ahern once did: “The boom is getting boomier.” And there is no symbol of change quite as stark as the empty block in the Dublin district of Ballsbridge with stickers on all its windows spelling out “SOS”.
Developer Sean Dunne planned to tear it down, along with everything else nearby, to build a “soaring Dubai-like diamond-shaped office tower”. This fantasy was finally scuppered the other week by a local planning board. Looking round this once-green country, one never knew it possessed such bodies.
Mr Dunne gave a notorious 3am pub interview to The New York Times last month, admitting he was close to insolvent but proclaiming defiance. He is seen as the epitome of the “cute hoors”, the deal-makers, duckers and divers who dominated the Ahern years.
Indeed, it’s easy to believe that the cute-hoor party, covering politicians, builders, financiers, bankers, senior civil servants and every chancer in Christendom, has been running the place for their own benefit for years. Here, everyone who matters knows everyone else.
But careful observers are more specific in their analysis. “There was an alliance between Fianna Fáil and the property developers,” says Jane Suiter, who teaches politics at Trinity College, Dublin. “The government saw light-touch regulation as giving Ireland competitive advantage. And as far as Ahern was concerned, the biggest multiplier for votes was construction jobs.”
Even Paddy Prendiville, editor of the satirical magazine The Phoenix, does not quite buy the wholesale conspiracy theory. “We’re a suspicious lot in this place,” he says. “We don’t trust anyone who rules and we presume they’re all at it.
“But you’ve got to remember that Ireland has never known prosperity like the past 10 to 15 years, ever. New money is always cruder and there is a certain gaucheness over here.”
Has Ireland been more corrupt than anywhere else? “I think we’re a bit more obvious and less practised.”