tales-from-the-promised-land: Site office, Moate, Co. Westmeath 2007
For 10 years, Ireland's boom just got "boomier", in the words of former Irish Prime Minister, Bertie Ahern. From 1996, house prices rose without a break, pumped with the most potent drug of all: cheap credit and plenty of it. Flimsy financial regulation, tax incentives and soaring numbers of economic immigrants - many of them put to work on construction, thereby creating a vicious circle - ensured that property became the dinner party staple of the era.
An unholy alliance of builders, developers, estate agents and bankers became the new gentry, mad with hubris, prospering in a culture of greed masquerading as entrepreneurship. Their conspicuous lifestyles - trophy homes, multiple holiday villas, yachts, helicopters and the occasional private jet - were not only accepted, but admired as the well-earned fruits of their buccaneering labours.
At government and local level, politicians facilitated the developers, riding roughshod over planning principles and re-zoning parcels of agricultural land in areas unfit for development. Landowners became multimillionaires overnight, as the builders moved in to throw up insanely over-priced suburban-style houses in rural locations, all of it financed by bankers driven by rivalry and minimal oversight.
Developers never had to worry about turning a profit, thanks to extraordinary house inflation, fast becoming a bubble. As desperate young couples were forced further from the city for affordable homes and overnight queues became a common feature of new home launches, agents and developers found new ways to milk the frenzy. Where before, phases one and two of a development might be a year apart, the greed fest reached a pitch where an apartment advertised at €270,000 on a Thursday morning could be hiked to €295,000 in a so-called "Phase 2" that same afternoon. Between 2000 and 2007, residential mortgage lending surged by more than 300 per cent - from €29 billion to €123 billion. (contd.)
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