Demolition starts on Ireland’s ghost estates as Celtic Tiger is put out of its misery.
There were times when it must have seemed that the party would never end. I vividly recall visiting Dublin in 2006 and being utterly astounded at the vast number of tower cranes that clawed at the city’s skyline.
At the time, Ireland could do no wrong. Buoyed by interest rates held low by its membership of the EU, the province enjoyed a period of unprecedented affluence. Nowhere was this more evident than in the housing sector where a staggering 93,000 new homes were built in a single year. To put that into context, the whole of the UK only built 110,000 new homes in the year to June 2013.
But then the luck of the Irish ran out. And when the recession hit, it hit Ireland hard; harder than most. A house valued at 300,000 Euros at the height of the Celtic Tiger boom is now worth less than a third that amount. Economists predict that property prices will not return to 2008 levels much before 2020. Given the parlous state of the Euro, even that appears optimistic.
As a result, many of the partially-completed housing estates now lie abandoned and overgrown; a grim and festering reminder of what might have been.
Some estimates suggest that more than 300,000 homes lie empty or unfinished and in need of removal which could be a boon for the local demolition sector.
While we would not deny the local contractors (and a few forward-thinking interlopers) a long-overdue boost in workload, I do wonder just how much thought has gone into the planned demolition of the more than 40 so-called “ghost estates”.
With Ireland’s economy still in the doldrums, it is unlikely that any of these demolished estates have a planned subsequent use in mind. Any demolition will cleave a gaping wound in the local landscape, leaving it open to the combined diseases of alienation, poverty and criminality.
Furthermore, on the face of it, this demolition would put a lot of potentially valuable secondary materials back into the market. But with Irish construction work currently in a deep stasis to which there is no foreseeable end, there is likely to be little or no demand for those materials.
Almost regardless of geographic location, construction (and, therefore, demolition) is ruled by an unavoidable and unwritten law that dictates that boom follows bust; the depth of that bust predicated by the height of the preceding boom.
So before we all board the luxury bus bound for boom-town, take a look at these photos of what remains of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger and remember, there but for the grace of God goes each of us.
