Business Post's View

Editorial: Amateurish property developers are a menace to public finances

Over and over, Irish property developers have shown a lack of competence, imagination or foresight, and then do nothing but assign blame elsewhere

‘Ireland’s woefully managed, comically amateurish, rent-extracting, shamelessly negligent property development industry’ has made ‘a litany of mistakes over many years’. Picture: Getty

There is a whiff of desperation about the government’s latest intervention in the housing crisis. The cabinet agreed last week to provide up to €2.5 billion to cover the cost of fixing shoddily built apartments. Most of these were built during the Celtic Tiger boom years, when Ireland’s construction industry, which did not know the first thing about building apartment blocks, built some of Europe’s most dismal apartment blocks in Dublin and elsewhere.

Details of ...