Hey Big Spender

Titled using a turn of phrase that would put the 1980's "Loadsamoney" culture in the UK to shame, the Irish newspaper "The Sunday Business Post" is organising a property exhibition in Dublin this month. The exhibition, quaintly called "Hey Big Spender" will no doubt be full of sharp-eyed wolves waiting to empty the wallets of those who have hit it big with the payouts on their state-sponsored investment accounts (otherwise known as SSIAs).

If the past is anything to go by, most of the exhibitors will, no doubt, be selling 'investment opportunities' in properties abroad... of course they are abroad, because no property in Ireland could be remotely considered an investment. The hyper-inflated Irish property market – where prices have been literally talked up to hyper-inflated levels by a small number of interested parties – offers no real investment opportunities. I believe there is moral dubiousness in treating residential property as an investment and not as a place to live, but I will leave that for another day.

Back to the overseas property people... in the absence of any real regulation of this burgeoning marketplace, the chances of encountering a cowboy are far higher than normal. Some of these companies have scant knowledge of the property law in the countries they are 'selling' - preferring to leave that to local legal experts. Having been accosted by staff from these 'overseas property' companies at shopping centres and other exhibitions, I gleaned that quite a few of them are staffed by people who possess no more than a rudimentary 'tourist' knowledge of the language of those countries they deal with. So caveat emptor! You have been warned.

In reality the “Hey Big Spender” exhibition and its vulgar moniker is but the tip of the iceberg. It is just another facet of the self-congratulatory, self-obsessed, morally vacuous, arrogant, uncaring, “me fein” country that Ireland has become since taxpayers in other EU countries and various international corporations decided to fund the so-called Celtic Tiger.

There is a certain irony in this overseas property boom that should not be lost on those who remember how Ireland was twenty years ago. I can remember families complaining bitterly in the media that the Germans were buying up so much property in the west of Ireland that people had to move away from the area they were born in to find affordable housing. Now that self-same media is busy urging us to price the Poles, Bulgarians, Romanians and assorted others out of their own property markets – and maybe even marketing these overseas properties to people who would probably object strongly to the Bulgarians and Romanians having the freedom to come here to live.