Search results
Ireland is a turbulent place. This book engages readers with the contours of transformation of Irish society through a series of distinct episodes and sites where change can be confronted. The content of the book intersects with the boom and bust themes to explore the economic and social implications of the recession. The processes are as diverse as cross-border development, farming knowledges, food movements, and the evolution of traditional Irish music. The modernisation of Irish society during the Celtic Tiger and its subsequent demise was a 'spatial drama' involving transformation in the material landscape and the imaginative representation of the island. The first part of the book explores the revolving intersections of identity politics with place. It tracks the discovery of the ghost estate and the ways in which it has been implicated in debates about the Irish economic crash, complicating ideas of home and community. After a discussion on immigration, the book discusses the role of migrants in filling labour and skill shortages. The second part pays attention to questions of mobility and consumption in urban and rural contexts. The new Irish motorway network, free time, leisure and holidaying in the lives of lone parents during the Celtic Tiger, and the role of National Asset Management Agency (NAMA) are discussed. The third part explores diverse cultural practices and some longstanding representations of Ireland. An autobiographical tour of the pub session, National Geographic's representations of Irish landscape and the current Irish imagination are the key concepts of this part.
contributed to the crisis. This chapter provides a short synopsis of the ghost estate issue, detailing the factors that contributed to the phenomenon, the way in which the estates have been invoked as symbolic spaces within the national narrative of collapse, and the State’s response in the form of the National Assets Management Agency. The Irish property bubble The presence of ghost estates in the Irish landscape exemplifies the problems associated with the Celtic Tiger property boom. Put simply, too many houses were built. From 1996 to 2005, 553,267 houses were built in
’ (Harvey, 2008; Lefebvre, 1968), ‘the just city’ (Fainstein, 2010), and Marcuse’s (2009) ‘commons planning’. Here, the chapter points to the practical means of developing the basis to a more balanced and socially orientated urban and surburban future. It is argued that the existence of vacant property and land, which in the case of the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA) is, by default at least, in state ownership, provides a platform for a shift in the approach taken towards urban liveability in Ireland. The liveable city Throughout the last number of decades, the
Dirtbag, Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years, PS, I Love You and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time respectively. Mr S and the Secrets of Andorra’s Box (Howard 2008c) deals with his new job as the rugby coach of the Andorran national team and also with his attempts to cope with separation from Sorcha and Honor while NAMA Mia (Howard 2011) conflates the National Asset Management Agency and the Abba song ‘Mama Mia’, and, like his 2012 book The Shelbourne Ultimatum, it deals with an Ireland suffering the effects of austerity in the wake of the Celtic Tiger
of Leitrim, its houses deemed not viable for completion and scheduled for eventual demolition by the National Assets Management Agency (NAMA), an agency established by government in 2009 to handle the housing crisis. It is therefore a doomed estate, built as part of the unregulated free-falling development in Ireland during the ‘Celtic Tiger’ economic boom that lasted from 2000 to
driven by the growth in industry and ICT. This building activity has been heavily influenced by government action, led by the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA), a controversial agency that had a mandate after the crisis of 2008 to obtain the best return for the state on the distressed loans it took on from developers and banks. However, in practice, NAMA has played a very significant role in
crisis, including the nationalisation of Anglo in January 2009, the creation of the National Assets Management Agency (NAMA), 7 and a series of ‘final announcements’ about bank recapitalisation in which the costs escalated and all banks originally covered under the guarantee, with the exception of BoI, were effectively nationalised. 8 The banking crisis is calculated to have cost the state €64.1 billion, adding 41 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) to the national debt (Committee of Public Accounts, 2012 ), 9 which grew from 25.1 per cent of GDP in 2007 to
analysis by the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA) and through the Prudential Capital Assessment Review (PCAR) process has since revealed that the loan portfolio of Anglo Irish Bank was at this point ‘well on the road towards insolvency’.35 In September 2008, the government offered a comprehensive State Guarantee for the liabilities of the six Irish-owned banks. The blanket bank guarantee, as it became known, amounted to €440 billion of Irish bank liabilities which was later increased to €485 billion to cover foreign-owned banks with significant operations in
extensive use by the Government (in breach of an express commitment to the contrary) of the legislative guillotine to cut short debate, 150 150 National parliaments in the European Union particularly in relation to crisis legislation. (Remarkably, the Credit Institutions (Financial Support) Act 2008, which provided €440 billion of guarantees for Irish banks passed all legislative stages in less than 24 hours.)22 Beyond this, extraordinarily broad legislative delegations of power were made, both to government ministers23 and to the National Asset Management Agency.24
is about to unfold into the future. Haughey’s photographs, in the combination of the ambient light that envelops the half-built landscape and their animation of the temporal anxiety of the contingent moment of the past and what is becoming, provide an ‘unsettling’ perspective of the post-Celtic Tiger landscape. David Farrell’s Banamaland comprises a vast survey of the ghost estates that have become the spiralling depreciated assets of the National Asset Management Agency. Systematically surveying ghost estates in each of Ireland’s twenty-six counties, Farrell