Sign up to The Irish Times Archive (1859 - 2008)My Account »

While many property developers during the boom liked to see themselves as patriotic avengers of historic injustices, in this extract from his new book, ‘Ship of Fools’, FINTAN O’TOOLEshows how Ireland’s astonishing property bubble was based on an age-old problem: ownership of the land by a tiny elite

PADDY KELLY didn’t have a Rolls Royce. He had, as he corrected his interviewer, Eamon Dunphy, on RTÉ radio at the end of November 2008, “several” Rolls Royces. He didn’t have a house on Shrewsbury Road, where, perhaps because it was the most expensive property on the Irish version of Monopoly, all the developers wanted to live. He had two houses on Shrewsbury Road. He hadn’t yet gone bust – that would take another few months – and the “hundreds of millions” of euro he confessed to owing the banks were, he said, “no great burden” to him. But he was, nonetheless, one of the oppressed, the heir to a legacy of great suffering and injustice whose every triumph was a blow struck for history’s victims.