The roof falls in on Ireland's Millionaires Row

[n2doc]

Andrew Clark in Dublin

Walford on Shrewsbury Road in Dublin, the most expensive residential street in the Irish capital, where prices have crashed by 50% or more. Photograph by Kim Haughton for the Observer


There is a padlock on the gate of Walford, the most expensive house in the priciest street in Ireland. Graffiti adorn the conservatory windows, the lawn is overgrown and old mattresses are piled up in the front room.

In a well-publicised deal at the height of Ireland's economic boom, this red-brick mansion, which sits on a one-and-a-half-acre plot, was sold for an eye-watering €56m (£48m) to a mysterious trust called Matsack Nominees, widely reported in the Irish media to be controlled by the wife of a millionaire property developer, Sean Dunne. The neighbours include telecoms tycoon Denis O'Brien, the biggest shareholder in Independent News & Media, who bought Belmont, a house a few doors down, for €35m.

Walford, which sits abandoned after a failed redevelopment application, is on Shrewsbury Road – a pleasant, tree-lined avenue in the Dublin inner suburb of Ballsbridge which, in the extraordinary gold rush that gripped Ireland, ranked as the sixth most expensive street in the world, ahead of Beverly Hills's Carolwood Drive and St Moritz's ritzy Via Suvretta.

more
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/05/dublin-housing-market-crisis-bailout

[Tuesday Afternoon]

1. Matsack...

:D :yoiks:

[rfranklin]

2. They have a knack for investing wisely...

something that regular people can't match.

[postulater]

3. "Walford, which sits abandoned"

Guess they didn't want to live there after all.

Must be a bad neighborhood.

[theHandpuppet]

4. Weep not for the greedy

But for those who will ultimately pay the greatest price, the working class.

The property bubble burst two years ago and the Irish government has so far absorbed €45bn in bank losses, with a further provision of €10bn under last week's bailout deal with the IMF and the European Union. But nagging doubts about whether this will be enough have undermined Ireland's sovereign credit rating.

<snipping>
Another demonstrator, maintenance worker Paul Shields, said: "The IMF are here for one thing: to take care of the German banks, the Swiss banks, the British banks who are owed money by our banks. This will cost our country billions over the years."
Many of the Irish millionaires on Shrewsbury Road have seen their wealth decimated. But they aren't the real victims of Ireland's crisis. The country's unemployment rate is 13.5%. It fell by a tenth of a percentage point last month, but only because people are leaving the country to find work. Britain's rate, in contrast, is 7.7% and Europe's average rate is 9.6%.

<snipping>
Unions oppose a €1 cut in the minimum wage to €7.65 (£6.42), although this will still be well above Britain's £5.93. And Begg argued for a slower, longer-term period of budget deficit reduction: "There's a better, fairer way of doing this."