From their breaking news section:
Dublin House Prices at quarter of boom levels
A new survey shows the asking price for houses in Dublin fell by almost 18% in the year to June and more than 23% since their peak.
Basic maths fail on the headline front. No doubt this will get fixed.
Today’s Irish Times. We’re back on the subject of blasphemy.
Mr Ahern said the legislation, which passed its committee stage in the Dáil yesterday, has been drafted to “make it virtually impossible to get a successful prosecution [for blasphemy] out of it”.
I have some issues with this. I want to know why we need to produce legislation that some politician thinks it will be virtually impossible to get a successful prosecution for. What is the point of this? Why not just decriminalise it?
Mr Ahern insists blasphemy must remain a crime, unless the reference to it in the Constitution is removed. “It is already there in the 1961 Act, and it is in the Constitution and we have to comply with the Constitution. You are in derogation of your duty if you ignore the Constitution,” he told Opposition TDs.
Could we see such enthusiasm for handling other issues relating to the constitution such as abortion, and the legal framework for that, which has been hanging over the government’s head for a while? No?
Blasphemy is an anomaly in a modern country. It shouldn’t exist in a country where technically church and state are separate. We don’t have an established church here. The correct and intelligent move is not to legislate for but to remove it from the Constitution. For anyone who actually doesn’t believe in a god, I can’t imagine how it could be possible to blaspheme anyway. For anyone who does believe in some god or gods, it should be an internal matter to their particular faith. What it should not, under any circumstances be is a crime.
But according to the Irish Times:
Mr Ahern, who opposes a constitutional amendment, said he could proceed with his plans; abandon the legislation, or else hold a referendum.
The piece does not outline why he opposes a constitutional amendment, nor why proceeding with his plans in the face of near universal opposition even from the religious wing.
I would like to know why we can’t amend the constitution. It’s not like anyone cared that much about the question of blasphemy. I’d like to know who else might be pushing this because I’ve only seen opposition.
But that doesn’t actually account for much. I paid 295E to the National Aquatic Centre the other day for corporate membership (swim only) so that I could go swimming any time I like. I did this last year but didn’t swim as often as planned owing to other commitments,.
That will not happen this time. I am unfit, and somehow, between February and May I put on quite a bit of weight. I don’t care so much about that because I’ve found that if I get regular exercise, it tends to fall back off. Fitting in the regular exercise has been difficult. I have been swimming in the last six weeks or so, so that’s good.
Previously I could swim 1600m on my back in under an hour. It’s not a bad speed and actually it was about as fast as my front crawl. This is because I was a woeful front crawler. Currently, however, there’s little to choose. I don’t know what’s gone wrong with my back stroke technique but bleurgh. My front crawl is working better than it ever had and given how little I swam and the fact that I rarely if ever front crawl, I don’t know how that might be.
I have a target of 400m in 8 minutes which if you know anything at all you’ll know is lifeguard standard. I’m way off it. I’m doing 25m in 39 seconds at the moment which is 9 seconds to slow per 25m stint. And at most, currently, I can string about 75m together.
So there are two main targets - string the 400m together - well actually if I get the swimming working at all I’d like to be back up to 1600m, and get the efficiency working. I feel I’ve a better chance of it because even when I was swimmign 1600m on my back before, I could not string 25 m together front without dying.
I did lose my favourite nose clip, however, which is not good. It’s not so much that I lost it as I dropped it in the 2.4m deep pool and was just too buoyant to dive down and get that. This is because of my weight, I guess. So every single bleeding length I swam, I saw it there, at the bottom of the pool.
I also now own a copy of Total Immersion the book and am interested in getting that together stylewise too. I’m not getting quite all of it but some of it is making sense. I want to be an efficient swimmer. I want it to be easy. And I’d like to be able to swim greater distances so…well that’s what I’ll be doing. Preferably not losing any more favourite speedo nose clips though.
If I’m not listening to music via my iPod I tend to be listening to it via some internet station. I have been looking for the ultimate chill station and my choices are either Radio IO or drawn from Live365.com
Yesterday, via some station on Live365 I discovered that the CIA are recruiting. If you are a patriotic American interested in serving your country, try cia.gov for further information.
I’m trying to imagine the Irish secret service - you know, the one that we don’t have - advertising on Crash.FM. It’s not happening.
Matt rocks. Thanks to him, despite a monumental lack of organisation on my part, I was still inside the Olympia on Friday night to hear the impressively amazing wunderkind that is Bill Bailey. He left me greatly entertained. He put smiles on my face. He did west country hip hop that was just fantastic.
It was the best fun I’ve had on a Friday night since I can’t remember.
I’d friends around for dinner yesterday. Being a JIT type of girl, I resolved to go to Tesco at 10am, do the shopping and be ready for dinner at the appointed 3pm. Things didn’t quite work out that way.
The menu involved roast chicken. The reason for that is that I am a bit iffy about roasting chicken when there is only me eating it, so I use it on other people when they come around. Roasting chicken involves acquiring a chickent, and normally you’d expect Tesco in ClareHall to have said chickens. In fact, they nearly always do. Yesterday, however, Tesco in Clarehall was exceptionally closed. This was a bit annoying to be honest, but you know, there’s a Tesco in Artaine Castle in case you’re stuck; I haven’t been in it for years, but they’ll surely have chickens to roast, the way most grocery stores do. Artaine Castle, I discovered was a 24 hour Tesco. This was news to me - it used not to be. Anyway, it was academic because it, like Clarehall, was closed, and promising us an improved new store at 9am on Tuesday morning.
Okay. Fine. Not ideal, and it’s not my favourite Tesco in the world, but the one in Omnipark should be open at this stage too. It’s not a 24 hour one, but what the hell.
It too was closed. I mentally went through the list of available supermarkets I could think, assessing them for the likelihood of having sweet potatos and roastable chickens and eventually wound up in the Supervalu in Killester. It was packed. It had the roastable chickens and the sweetpotatos for the sweetpotato tart that was up for dessert. The tart involved pasty though and I usually buy the frozen stuff out of convenience and have done with it.
I forgot to buy it basically because I spent most of the time in that Supervalu - which was probably picking up a lot of lost souls from two nearby Tescos - lost and looking for stuff. So ultimately, I wound up having to make pastry yesterday as well as starting the roasting of everything a bit late. Fortunately my guests, who have a toddler, were running late, so no major disaster.
The last time I remember actually making pastry was when I was 11 years old in cookery class with my friend Nicola. We were making apple tart and the deal was you made the pastry at home and brought it in. I made mine. It was rather soft. It was extremely melt in your mouth. She nearly killed me because there were test scores going on this apple tart and the pastry was too flaky and difficult to roll out. We had to undo the bad impression of the soft and crumbly apple tart with a killer bread and butter pudding 5 months later for which we scored 9.5 out of 10. Don’t ask me what cost us the half point.
Either way, yesterday I needed a pastry recipe and so I looked at the wide array of cookbooks I owned and figured that the most likely to have a simple can’t fail pastry recipe was the Good Housekeeping Cookbook. It’s entirely possible that Nigella Lawson has it in all three of her books that I own (Feast is rubbish but How to Eat and How to be A Domestic Goddess are good books to have in the kitchen). There’s something about me and pastry though; this was again, extremely crumbly and melt in your mouth. Clearly I haven’t improved at pastry making in 25 years. I also need to take out my food processor to make said pastry.
I don’t know why I bought the good processor but I do know I bought it in Belgium which means it is at least 10 years old. I also know it never got used once while I was living in either of the last 2 houses which means it has not been used for 6 years. I’d also forgotten that a design feature of it being bought in Belgium means that it has a two pin plug. I suspect I bought it to make stuffing which is why I’d have needed it yesterday anyway; I just needed it twice yesterday because of the impromptu pastry making session. So it was with some trepidation that I located an adaptor, plugged it in and checked if it worked. Good thing about yesterday? The food processor still works.
It’s a cool little thing; made for someone living in a small apartment like I did at the time I bought it, and ingeniusly designed. To be honest, I haven’t ever seen a small processor that looks as useful as this was. I’m glad it still worked.
Dinner was ultimately a successful endeavour. The chicken was cooked perfectly, the stuffing smelled beautiful although it was a tad not quite the consistancy I was aiming for. I hate the onions I bought yesterday but choice was not really mine at the time I was shopping. And despite - or possibly because of - the melt in your mouth and impossible to cut flaky shortcrust pastry, dessert was a start performance.
And that was all fine until 3.17 this morning when I woke up in a very bad way. I mean, I wanted to do. I need to point out - self indulgently - that I can count on one hand the number of times I have vomited in my adult life. Once was in 1998 during a holiday in Finland that involved some really, really bad Spanish sherry, and another was about 2 years ago, I think. Despite the sherry, neither involved a hangover - I usually just get horrible bad headaches from those.
Otherwise, I haven’t thrown up ever. Well that was a problem at 3.17 this morning because frankly I had a choice between dying and throwing up and the throwing up was not happening at all. Of course the one thing that went through my mind was that I had actually fed people yesterday and if this was connected to dinner then how much worse could I possibly feel - bearing in mind that I wanted to die at that stage. I crawled into work and eventually called them at lunch time to check out how they were. They turned out to be in rude good health and most surprised to hear that I’d been up sick quite a lot of the night. My mother tells me there are things such as stomach bugs, they happen, you throw up and it’s not because you have food poisoning from food you made yourself. Today has been a bland food kind of day. Bread has featured heavily. I don’t do being sick very well. It slows me down. It happens very rarely so it is hard for me to admit that I can’t do stuff because I’m sick. It’s happened abit this year, a few more colds, a dose of the flu.
Oh well. Anyway work today was alright - people left me alone once they worked out I wasn’t going to throw up on top of them although they wondered what the hell I was doing there. They’re probably right although had I been making the decision at 3.45am, it’s a safe bet I would have not gone to work.
Somebody was paid to produce this sob story. I have a long record in writing about property on this site, on pages of the PropertyPin.com and on boards.ie. I think that I should get paid to provide drivel like this too.
I moved house recently as anyone who knows me can attest. I don’t shut up about how brilliant things are. They are like, utterly fantastic. Maybe it’s the fact that in deciding to move house we also got a summer. Look out in the garden. The sun is shining. Oh yeah - garden. I have a garden. It’s amazing.
I lived in a three bedroom duplex apartment in Swords for the last 4 years. No garden. Completely impractical balcony. Flatmates. We will skip the murky details but I stayed there for a couple of reasons a) moving house is hell and I promised the next time I moved it would be to my own place and b) it was near work. I like not having to spend half my life commuting. I do not know what the M50 looks like at 8.30 in the morning because I was very often still in bed and still at work on time. But the lack of a garden drove me up the wall and having watched rents in the city slowly fall, I resolved that if I was going to spend 1000E in rent a month, I’d prefer to spend it in the north city than in Swords.
My friends laugh when I talk about moving back into the city. According to them, Dublin 9 is not the city. It’s not town. It’s far out. Well, maybe they are right. Some of them grew up in the area. But compared to Swords, it’s monumentally different. The bus into the heart of the city centre takes 15 minutes for the most part. Where I play on Dollymount Strand is 15 minutes drive away. Where I work is 15 minutes in the other direction down the M1, outbound. When I lived in Swords, the beach was around 35 minutes to go, and work was about 10. And by bus into town well, you could get the Swords Express and it took 35 minutes or so, or you could get a 41 and fly to the moon and back in the time it took to get from Swords to the city centre. The buses were a bit less frequently, the time table a bit less reliable. I drove everywhere, and everywhere generally amounted to the shopping centre in Swords. The carparks in the city centre could be busy, were expensive, shopping or just dossing around town was too much of an effort. Dossing around home on the internet was somehow just easier, unless I made my way to the beach which I couldn’t without sitting in a car for ages during match days in Croke Park. Somewhere in the last 3 years, living in Swords ceased to be attractive.
This was a problem. I had been looking at the possibility of buying in Balbriggan when things became affordable again. I reasoned it was likely to be the most likely to be affordable for a single person. But when push came to shove I had realised that all the things that made Swords no longer attractive were magnified for Balbriggan. It was off the list of places to purchase. So I realised that the next move from the duplex apartment would be back into rental, again. Not ideal, but given the alternatives - living somewhere I did not want to live and paying more or less the same money - it wasn’t the worst option on the table by a long shot. I picked where I wanted to live, found a house there, negotiated the rent down as best I could. I know already that in 3 months it will be lower again but that’s the break and at least I’m only tied into this for one year as opposed to 35. And I moved.
It’s been terrific. I’m in town more often; going out is easier, taxi fares have fallen off a cliff by comparison. I’m a lot more relaxed. I think with the garden I feel a lot less cooped up. And I’m watching house prices in the area. When push comes to shove, I will probably buy here if I can afford it. If not, then I probably just won’t buy. I’m happy living here.
One of the features of life in Ireland - since I came back - is that people have bought houses in places that they just, by the normal run of things, would never want to live in. They missed a key point whereby if a few can trade their way into the city from the commuter belt, then if everyone tries to do it, it’s just not possible. People are complaining about the decisions they made and I sometimes wonder how carefully they thought them through. The first thing I would always consider about a house that I was buying was “If I get stuck here, for any reason, can’t move for financial reasons, am I going to hate it?” People were buying investment vehicles; gambling on house prices moving a certain way to allow them to buy homes. If they bought homes up front, we would have less wailing and gnashing of teeth over what happened and anyway, what did happen wouldn’t have happened.
Collectively, the house buying public in Ireland completely lost the run of themselves. They bought off the plans - again gambling that prices would rise so that they could console themselves that they had got a good deal. The fact that the properties in question might not be delivered for 2 years was an irritation at best. It’s now a huge, huge problem for some people who may not even see their properties completed. Why did this happen? Because people lost their critical faculties in judging what success was.
I have a cousin who is married with a few kids. His wife came to me one day and said “You know, we’re never going to be rich. We have kids, and I’m staying at home to mind them, we’re not business people, X has his job and what matters to me is that we are happy as a family. I don’t care if our car is 10 years old.” It’s not an attitude that has been hugely prevalent in Dublin of late. They don’t live in Dublin.
For the last number of years, more or less, your success tended to be measured in terms of how much the value of your house increased by. You could impress people by regaling them with stories of how much the bank gave you. Now, of course, this has changed. If you buy, success is in regaling people with how much you knocked off the property compared to the asking price.
Neither of these things is healthy. What should have mattered - and what clearly hasn’t for years - was what is this property like, does it fit your needs, is it located reasonably sanely to your work place. I work in north County Dublin. I know people commuting from Carlow. When people stop looking at the practical issues like this, bad things happen. If people hadn’t been desperate to get on the property ladder at ALL costs, it’s fair to say that properties would not have been built in places that just won’t have the demand in the future, and property prices would not have exploded the way they did. People paid the most they could, not the least.
Where am I going with all this? Well, an increasing number of people are in negative equity; quite a few developers who paid too much for development land are in trouble, and there are issues in the economy relating to the fact that a big bit of our economy was dependent on trading unmovable objects to each other with borrowed money. It is absolutely sickening to see how this is impacting on the rest of the economy which was reasonably healthy apart from the fact that people needed more and more money to pay for accommodation over that time.
Unfortunately, for me, things are not going to change for the better because…instead of some rationality coming in, we have a pendulum effect. Property investment is out and this is depressing because we actually do still need some sort of a rental market. But the extent to which people have had their fingers burned on property may limit the number of entrants to supply rentals. And people will still judge other people’s decisions with an eye on the financial rather than the practical. I’m lucky. I didn’t buy in Slane or Dundalk or somewhere and I am now living somewhere I want to live.
Lots of people…however…can’t say the same.
Oh dear. My world has just fallen apart. Muse in the O2 is sold out. SOLD OUT. Already? The last time they played in the old Point I got the last ticket the day before the concert. How is this gig sold out 5 months in advance?
Dammit all to hell anyway.
[this was a rant brought to you by browsing the MCD site to see if there are any gigs I want to go to, soon]
I live in Dublin 9 and there is a double room available in my house for 420E a month. The house is three bedroomed but I occupy two rooms. I’m looking for someone who is not too precious about sand (I kitesurf, I take photographs of kitesurfers), photographs, books and CDs. Actually I want someone I can get on well with and have a laugh with from time to time but who will not wake me regularly at 4am. The Daft ad is here but there’s more than enough info about me on this site to give you an idea of what I’m like.
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