Defects

Living with the Legacy of the Celtic Tiger

Eoin Ó Broin

• Publisher: Merrion Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781785373985
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Droit
• Subtopic: Droit du logement et du développement urbain

All across Ireland, thousands of people are living in apartments and houses with serious fire safety and structural defects. Some of these have made the news, many more have not.

Defects: Living with the Legacy of the Celtic Tiger tells the horrifying story of these people and how they came to be trapped in dangerous homes.

In this follow-up to Home, his hugely popular and acclaimed manifesto for public housing reform, Eoin Ó Broin reveals how decisions made by successive governments from the 1960s to the 1990s led to an alarmingly light touch building control regime. This regime, when combined with the hubris and greed of Celtic Tiger-era property development, allowed defective and unsafe properties to be built and sold in huge numbers to unsuspecting victims.

Who was responsible? Why were they allowed to get away with it? And who will foot the bill to fix these potentially fatal defects?

All these questions and more are answered in this hard-hitting and shocking investigative work.

PART 1

CHPTER ONE

The Biggest Purchase of Your Life

‘Absolutely over the moon’

Stephanie Meehan grew up in Baldoyle, five minutes from Priory Hall. She went to school locally, socialised in the area and ended up working in catering in the busy restaurant strip in Howth.

At the young age of 18 she met Fiachra Daly, who worked in the same cluster of restaurants in the picturesque seaside village. At first, they were friends. Three years later, they were in a relationship. She talks about socialising with work friends from the restaurant scene, of having a ‘good life’ with Fiachra filled with ‘happy times’.

The couple were renting together in Howth. In 2005 their first child, Oisin, was born and they decided to move closer to Stephanie’s family. They found a ‘gorgeous apartment’ in Grattan Lodge, right beside what was to become Priory Hall. Both were working hard and paying a hefty €915 rent per month. But they didn’t care, they had Oisin, they had steady jobs and they had each other.

When Priory Hall came on the market, Stephanie said, ‘We were very interested.’ They assumed that the apartments would be the same as Grattan Lodge: spacious, with great views.

In May 2005 the Irish Times property section announced, ‘Modern suburban apartments in D13’. The article went on to describe a 49 sq. m. one-bedroom showroom that had just opened, being sold through HOK Residential for €190,000. The two-bedroom apartments were 63 sq. m. and retailed at €240,000 to €249,000. The larger two-bedroom duplexes with 89 sq. m. were going for €288,000; the 3-bedroom 90 sq. m. duplexes, €290,000.

‘Each unit is dual aspect’, continued the article, ‘and is fitted out to a high standard, with fitted wardrobes in all units and wall tiling in the main bathroom and en suite, chrome shower doors, decorative coving in hallways and sitting rooms and generous apartments.’

Stephanie and Fiachra were saving a lot for a deposit but found it very difficult to get a mortgage. ‘We had a lot of refusals,’ she remembers. Lenders took a dim view of the long-term security of restaurant work.

But with help from family and a friendly broker, they eventually secured a loan from IIB, now KBC. ‘Everybody just wanted to see us get on the property ladder,’ said Stephanie. And though they both knew that ‘Priory Hall wasn’t going to be their forever home’, they felt good about getting a ‘footstep to having our own house at some stage’.

When asked how she felt when she finally got the mortgage, Stephanie said, ‘Absolutely over the moon. I was just thinking this is the start to a very secure and stable life.’ She and Fiachra were ‘setting out some foundations for our children and our family’. Indeed her ‘whole family were relieved … you just felt a great sense of security’.

‘It was a sense of relief’

If you stand on one of the top balconies of Priory Hall and look east, you can see Belmayne. Built not long after its neighbour, it was an ambitious 2,650 home development just off the Malahide Road in north Dublin. The scheme was to include two schools, a medical centre, a library, a crèche, a town centre, a child-friendly park and a range of shops and bars. This wasn’t just a development; it was a new suburb.

For 35-year-old Mark, Belmayne ticked a lot of boxes. Back living in his parents’ home after years of renting, he was saving for a deposit. ‘I was in a job that offered me access to credit for a property,’ he said, and having ‘spent quite a lot of time looking for somewhere to purchase’, he finally settled on Belmayne.

Prices were at their Celtic Tiger height in 2007 and the flat he bought was ‘far too expensive at €330,000 for a two bed’. But a lot of his friends had moved over to the northside of the city and ‘generally properties were more competitively priced there’. The development was also ‘quite well finished’.

Mark travelled a bit for work and, being close to Dublin Airport, Belmayne had the advantage of not being too far from the city centre while close to the terminal.

His idea was to ‘get a first home’. He had a steady girlfriend and, though not yet married, wanted ‘a starter home’. He remembers the day he moved in. ‘I think I was the first one into the block,’ he said. ‘It was a sense of relief.’ Despite the hefty mortgage, the first five years were interest only, so the young couple felt like they were doing well to be paying €600 per month.

Belmayne epitomised the Celtic Tiger brash self-image of wealth and glamour. And while Mark’s decision to buy in the new suburb was determined by price and location, the developer, Stanley Holdings, were not just selling houses, they were selling lifestyles.

The construction site hoardings had high-definition photographs of glammed-up models with slogans like ‘Gorgeous living comes to Dublin’ and ‘Afterhours @ Belmayne’. The not-so-subtle sexual undertones of the ads included a handsome young man dressed in black about to mount his model partner on the kitchen island with bottles of champagne placed conspicuously in the background.

The interiors of the showroom were designed by UK TV celebrity decorator Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen, while the gardens were by Irish celebrity landscaper Diarmuid Gavin. To add that extra bit of bling, the launch party was attended by the celebrity soccer and pop-star couple Jamie and Louise Redknapp.

If Mark felt his 80 sq. m. apartment was overpriced, other homes in Belmayne peaked at €600,000 for four-bedroom 188 sq. m. houses and €425,000 for 145 sq. m. three-bed units.

Not everybody was enamoured of the display of fashion and flesh on the Malahide Road. The McCann Erickson billboards were subject to an Advertising Standards Authority complaint, which was upheld, with the developer instructed to remove the offending hoarding.

But for Mark, he ‘finally had his own place’, the starter home that he had worked so hard for, saved so long for and now finally had the keys for.

‘I just felt so content’

On the other side of the city, tucked in off the N11 at the junction of White’s Cross, is a low-rise high-density gated apartment complex. Long before any of the residential developments that made up this stretch of the Stillorgan Road were built, Byrne’s Galloping Green pub held pride of place. It’s still there and its name was borrowed by Tudor Homes, who built 118 apartments next door – the last twenty of which went on the market in 1999.

The Irish Times property section described the apartments as ‘reached through spacious, bright foyers with high-speed lifts and sweeping stairwells. The units are finished out to a particularly high standard with good quality fitted kitchens, wall tiling in kitchens and bathrooms and maple Shaker-style wardrobes. Some of the apartments have two en suite bathrooms.’1 Prices ranged from £200,000 to £400,000.

By the time 26-year-old Ciara Holland came to buy one of the ground-floor apartments from its original owner, the price was €515,000.

Born in Stillorgan, Ciara attended school and college locally. In her mid-20s she was working and enjoying life, living at home with her parents. ‘The desire for me to have my own place’, she said half-jokingly, ‘was more for my parents. I was perfectly happy living with them, but I think they thought at 26 it was time I moved out.’

Ciara wanted to stay close to family and friends, and looked from Cabinteely to Sandyford to Stillorgan. ‘It was 2006, house prices were crazy,’ she recalls. ‘There was a kind of desperation, were prices going to keep going up?’

Her Special Savings Incentive Account had come to maturity and her parents ‘very generously’ helped her out. Coming in €100,000 below most of the other properties she saw, she went for a ground-floor, two-bedroom apartment in Galloping Green. They viewed the property twice. Had the surveyor out. Checked the management company’s accounts and sinking fund. ‘Everything was fine,’ she said.

The apartment blocks are arced around beautiful, landscaped gardens. ‘That was the most appealing thing,’ remembers Ciara, ‘and why my parents loved the complex. It felt really safe, it had secure gates, the gardens were beautiful and really well maintained.’

About three months after she moved in, she remembers coming home after a night out. ‘There used to be two wooden swings there … I sat on the swing … and I thought how incredibly lucky I was to be in this beautiful development, to own an apartment, I just felt so content.’

Of course, the mortgage payments were steep, at €1,800 a month, and the annual management fees were not far off that. ‘Looking back at it now, it was an incredible amount of money,’ Ciara recalls, ‘but back then it was the norm. €515,000 for a two bed was completely acceptable.’

‘It was an amazing feeling’

Almost a decade after Stephanie, Mark and Ciara bought their homes, Aine moved into her apartment in Carrickmines Green, on the expanding south-west fringe of Dublin county. Though construction of the 180 homes commenced in 2006, the developer, Laragan Developments, went bust in 2008. The appointment of McStay Luby as receiver the following year saw works restart.

When the apartments eventually went on sale in 2016, the Irish Independent reported that ‘hundreds of prospective buyers showed up’ for the launch.2 Under the headline ‘Apartments make the most of near-rural views’, the newspaper said that ‘the design makes the most of its near-rural setting in Dublin 18, with dual aspects and glass balustrade balconies in some of the units’, and with ‘wooden floors and polished granite kitchen among their best interior features’. Prospective buyers who may have been concerned at the remote location of the complex were reassured to know that ‘each unit comes with its own designated car space and there are plenty of parking spaces for visitors too.’

For Aine, however, price and proximity to family and friends were the deciding factors. She had recently split up with her boyfriend, Alan, and moved back in with her parents. She was ‘beyond living with other people and had to live on her own’ but couldn’t afford to rent. Soon she discovered that buying would be just as difficult.

‘I was extremely angry,’ she said. ‘I was livid at the fact that I had worked so hard to get to a point in my life where I had a very good job with a good salary and that still as a single woman I could not live on my own.’

Luckily for Aine, her parents were able to help and, along with her own savings, they managed to put together a large deposit of €100,000. ‘It was still incredibly difficult as a single earner’, remembers Aine, ‘to purchase a property and if I hadn’t had that substantial deposit, I don’t think I would have got a mortgage.’

Though her first memory of being in the apartment was ‘the noise from the road’ prompting her to think, ‘Oh my God what have I done?’, she remembers that after moving in ‘it was an amazing feeling’.

Shortly afterwards, Aine and Alan patched things up, and two years later they married. The following year they had their first child.

‘You can watch the sun set in the evening’

On the other side of the country, in Shannon, County Clare, the 240-unit Brú an Sionna complex was built and sold before the developer Paddy Burke Builders went into receivership in 2010.

Some years earlier, The Irish Times had told prospec...