Ireland is a strange place. Witness the recent case of a couple, Brendan and Asta Kelly, who were evicted from a detached house in Killiney after they had failed to make a payment on a €2 million mortgage since 2009 (Sunday Times 22nd April).
It turns out they previously "ran a successful arts and crafts business called Irland Haus", according to the same source. They also had a "significant property portfolio across Ireland".
Yesterday's Irish Times put some meat on that "significant", reporting that they had purchased "up to" 21 properties in the late nineties and early noughties and "are still the owners of the bulk of these apartments".
Now they are camping outside their Killiney pad - sorry, the bank's Killiney pad - after bailiffs finally moved on a repossession order made against them two years ago. There's more. They are also, according to the Irish Times, "the owners of 13 apartments" in London.
Incredibly, the Irish section of the Occupy Movement (recently of the Central Bank, Dame Street) staged a sit-in in the Dublin City Sheriff's Office in their support. Now I know the make-up of many such movements are, regrettably, very middle-class... but this is incredible even by their standards. Was it not prices-can-only-ever-go-up large-scale property investors who created the bubble and bust in the first place, by adding to their greedy portfolios while pricing those who wanted to nest rather than invest, out of the market?
Ireland is a strange place.
A place where the most privileged are the most militant when shouting about their "rights", be they Irish Language hobbyists and careerists, teachers, doctors, consultants or property investors. These are the voices you hear all the time in Ireland.
Reacting to the fiasco, Finance Minister Michael Noonan said something that made sense for once when he drew a distinction between people who wanted to stay in their homes and professional landlords - “We have no pledge to keep people in 21 different homes and we must distinguish between people who can’t pay and people who won’t pay", he observed.
That's a first for Noonan - a lucid observation. Though I'm sure the Occupy protesters springing to the defence of our Capitalist investors would disagree.
Perhaps this new alliance is just an expression of class solidarity, Irish style?
As I say... it's a strange place.
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