Property

Last Friday’s 9.55am train from Limerick pulled out on time, hurtling towards the ‘Junction’. As we sped past the waterlogged land on a beautiful morning, commuters on the train were going about their business as normal, reading about the treacherous Thierry Henry in the paper and chatting to friends on the phone. As we arrived…

Did you know that our country’s housing wealth has shrunk at a rate of €142.8m per day since the peak of the boom in 2007? This is a catastrophic figure because housing wealth was one of the key drivers of spending, and domestic spending is what kept the dole queues so low in the boom years.

Sometimes we can be an extremely vindictive society. In times of trouble, there’s often a dreadful clamour for vengeance. As a general rule, it seems sensible to avoid those who seek recrimination and punishment for those who made mistakes; although righteous indignation may satisfy a visceral yearning, vengeance and outrage don’t move things on one bit.

As the 10.50 train from Galway to Dublin pulls out of a rainy Tullamore, it is difficult not to conclude that the country is in a garrulous and angry mood. My neighbour — a middle-aged woman with grown-up children — has just got off but she was livid, venting spleen since we left the fields of Athenry.

What part of cheap land does the Green Party not understand? The Green Party values the land we walk on, not in the way Fianna Fail does, not for its price but for its value. And the cheaper our land is, the more value it has for the collective good. The more expensive the land is, the more value it has for individual owners.

The collapse in property values, the fact that the market here is in free-fall and developers and banks are bankrupt presents the single biggest opportunity this country has had in a generation.

Many people in recent weeks have tried to explain what is happening to the economy.

How can we visualise why credit has dried up? How do we rationalise the fact that we went from a situation of so much money we didn’t know what to do with it, to a situation of no cash at all? Where did it all go?

Many people in recent weeks have tried to explain what is happening to the economy.

How can we visualise why credit has dried up? How do we rationalise the fact that we went from a situation of so much money we didn’t know what to do with it, to a situation of no cash at all? Where did it all go?

Take a long look at the chart below. Digest it. Maybe look again if you have to. This happened in the most sophisticated economy in the world.

One of the things about crises is that they tend to blow the credibility of shibboleths out of the water.