Why so many empty cheap houses in Ireland?
During the early 1990s, with a young, English-speaking, low-cost workforce, low interest rates and government grants, Ireland’s export-oriented economy blossomed, growing by an average 6.5 per cent from 1990 to 2007.
By 2000, unemployment had plunged to 3.8 per cent, the lowest in Europe, from 16 per cent in the mid-1990s. Irish expats and new immigrants alike flocked to the country. In 2005, 100,000 immigrants arrived in Ireland, more than triple the 30,000 who came annually in the mid-1990s.
The newcomers and newly employed needed places to stay and Ireland’s bullish housing market was supercharged. Bank loan officers, anxious to boost commissions, encouraged many borrowers to take out loans far larger than they needed.
“A certain newfangled confidence began to emerge,” columnist Jody Corcoran wrote in 2010 in Ireland’s Sunday Independent newspaper. “We Irish, we had it cracked. . . Everybody wanted to own their own house, but many also wanted a second property, a holiday home; or an investment or two, an apartment in Bulgaria, a villa in Croatia or a mock-Tudor pile halfway up a mountain, half an hour’s drive from Lisbon.”
Even Ireland’s government seemed to relish the “greed is good” mentality. “The boom is getting boomier,” said then-Prime Minister Bertie Ahern, who suggested doomsayers should consider suicide rather than “talking down the economy.”
But Ireland’s bull market was, indeed, too good to be true. More houses were being built than could be occupied. In County Leitrim, for instance, housing supply from 2006 to 2009 outpaced demand by 401 per cent.
In September 2008, the U.S. bank Lehman Brothers collapsed. Days later, the stocks of Irish banks went into free-fall as investors and analysts came to grips with the fact that the country of 3.8 million was vastly overextended.
www.thestar.com/news/world/2012/05/05/th...re_and_eviction.html 
