GUBU
Clever dog - Bertie Ahern has €300,000 worth of payments that he can’t explain. So he gives lots of confusing explanations. Try as you might to piece everything together, the story changes on an weeky and monthy basis summed up by judge Mahon:
polar opposite accounts
The sums still don’t add up and even the special formula to explain the $45,000 payment (meant to be GB£) turned out to be non-existant by Mr. Ahern’s own admission.
What does this mean though? Was he just a poor man in need of a dig out? Remember that this was a senior figure in the party almost never out of power.
On the night before he was forced out of office in 1994, he changed the tax designation for the Golden Island site owned by Owen O’Callaghan. Eamon Dunphy is giving evidence that Owen O’Callaghan told him that Bertie Ahern
had been bought
he had taken money
he had been taken care of
If there was an innocent explanation for all of this, it didn’t come out at the tribunal and I doubt it will be in his memoirs.
Should he resign? I believe too many people judge the personality that is Bertie Ahern instead of the damage caused to the people living in estates that are incomplete or unsuitable. It isn’t easily apparent to those in the estates whose fault it is that there are no schools nearby, that there are no buses or that the land is prone to flooding. How often do you think a developer uses his reputation and connections to get planning approval or rezoning? Could you compete if you had funding?
The damage that is more tangible will be the value of property. With inflation around 4.5%, a drop of 3% is more than that. And with interest rates increasing (the ECB is only on a short break imho), there will be people finding it difficult to meet repayments, remortgaging, negative equity etc.
Not only that, but our economy is now at risk as a result of relying on construction and speculation since 2002. If you had €300,000 to invest, would you put it in a house to rent or in a business idea? Every time you hear someone say that the fundamentals of the economy are stable, think of this
Construction makes up 23pc of Ireland’s GNP and employs 416,000 people
And people have learned to invest in property instead of anything else - how many people are buying shopping centres in Berlin or villas in Spain?
The government itself is massivly exposed to the slowdown in the property sector - up to 45% of a newly built house goes towards taxes and local authority levies such as stamp duty and VAT on materials etc. Add to that the taxes paid by those employed in construction and the services they consume. It isn’t as if there are many other industries for these people to go into. The alternative to residential construction is commercial or public infrastructure projects. But taxes received have dropped substantially in the last few months, we can expect a deficit of €1 billion and with inflation running at 4.5%, there isn’t much room to splash out on capital projects.
If that has depressed you, then A Random Walk picked up some quotes* for every situation
If house Prices are rising.
If house Prices are static.
If house Prices are falling.
What do you say to anyone who says that you’ve been wrong, very wrong to date?
When was the last time you recommended that anyone should hold off on buying?
and for a real quote that A Random Walk spotted:
I think we’ll see a bit of stagnation, maybe a five to ten per cent fall but no real collapse
after Northern Ireland prices rose 51% in a single year.
I like his interpretation of the lexicon too:
- Soft Landing - Anything ranging from house prices rising at the rate of inflation to a 20% drop
- Stagnation - Massive 60% swings in the velocity of house prices, property investors losing their shirts.
- Hard Landing - Eruption of nearby volcano, nuclear war.