Millionaires hold tight to bricks and mortar

Look down on this island from the sky, and you see land that looks like a crazy quilt, torn into tiny squares over generations and stitched together by stone walls. Traditionally, the Irish are possessive of their scrap of land - and jealous of other people's. Maybe that's why we've reacted with some bitterness to the news that the latest millionaire's row in Carrickmines sold out in less than four hours.

The descendants of the hands which built those stone walls, are busy amassing the property portfolios of the 1990s. Other people may invest in paintings, antiques, stocks and shares, but with the Irish people's memory of dispossession, an investment has to be something you can keep a cow on, if necessary. "There are a number of people out there who have the opportunity to invest money and look at the options and they find stocks and shares to be very intangible. They prefer investments they can physically see, like property," says Simon Ensor of Sherry FitzGerald.

Last week's sale of 16 £1 million houses in less than the time it takes to drive to Cork, provoked a little jealousy. We felt worse when we heard, whether or not it's true, that the people who could afford these astronomical prices were youngish couples, most of them under 40.

After we got over the fact that so many could have become so rich, so young, we started criticising their taste by asking whether these palaces were really worth the price, or whether the new owners were just nouveau riche wannabes. For those of us nearer the middle end of the scale, it has all been a bit hard to take. We are used to hearing about the dangers of a two-tier society, but we always thought that having two-tiers meant that we would be on the top. By last week, it was becoming clearer: in the two-tier society, people earning salaries which would have been regarded as respectable 10 years ago, were now finding themselves close to the bottom. The rich are richer than we could ever hope to be.

There is nothing new in Irish people being rich, it's just that, until recently, they had the decency to emigrate to earn their money. Sure, we heard all about the fabulous standards of living that successful emigrants enjoyed in the US and Australia. But we tolerated their huge houses with swimming-pools because they weren't in our faces. And also, we smugly believed that we had something they didn't - a better quality of life. Such self-deception has been rubbished by the brave, new trend of having it all - the higher standard of living on top of the Irish quality of life (which is deteriorating by the day).

The purchasers of the Carrickmines mansions have done something quite extraordinary and new: they have emigrated without leaving the country. They've done this by purchasing membership to an exclusive club: an estate where all your friends are as rich as you are. Insulated in sylvan landscaping from the dreary, drab realities of vast tracts of grey, cement Dublin, these young millionaires can pretend to be living in one of Connecticut's lawnier suburbs.

Back in the poor old days, we didn't envisage that the Irish success story would be like this. As Fr Brendan Hoban wrote in his Western People column last week: "There was a time when we thought that if Ireland was a wealthy country we'd be different . . . we'd spread it around. Give people a chance . . . Our own history would have prepared us for this largesse . . . When we hadn't two pounds to rub together, we were all chat about justice and equality but once the Celtic Tiger began to roam the land and we became a land of milk and honey, we began to sing from a different hymn-sheet."

The in-your-face wealth of the nouveau riche Irlandais - whether their houses are in Dalkey, Dublin 4, Howth or Kinsale - comes with a lifestyle that has it's own price tag. "Nobody in their right mind would want to go back to the poverty-stricken past where the constant quest for survival exhausted people and certainly did not augur well for loving, healthy relationships. However, we are in danger of replacing that exhaustion with the modern trap of working too hard, acquiring all the trappings of the 1990s and maximising our earning and investment potential.

"Surely we can do better than replace one exhaustion for another," says Ruth Barror, chief executive of the Marriage and Relationships Counselling Service in Dublin. "The temptation to acquire more at the expense of our own individual well-being and of our relationships is strong. There's a sense of making hay while the sun shines. It is difficult to pass up opportunities to invest in property, but we must invest in our relationships also," she warns.

"Being rather than doing is important for intimacy. Simply being requires time and space which are at a premium in today's lifestyles.

"Whilst the stock markets are barometers of the health or otherwise of our investments, signs that all is not well in a relationship are much more subtle, and can be missed in the rush. Ignoring these subtle signs may prove far more painful than fluctuating financial fortunes."

Her warning is just as appropriate to long-time home-owners who have decided to use the equity which they have built up in their homes during the property boom, to re-invest in other properties in Dublin and around the country and abroad. There is a new class of Irish landlord out there - people who own several apartments and houses that they often refer to as their "pension", people who snap up "toblerone" houses in far flung seaside resorts, just to cut their tax bill. But maybe this is just jealousy talking again.

Simon Ensor thinks that people are being quite sensible by using the equity in their homes to invest in property. "People have their heads screwed on. They know that the unprecedented growth will not continue. But what is the use in having your money on deposit at an interest rate of two per cent? You're losing money."

Many of the new property investors have the money and the houses, but they may not have the time to enjoy them.

Many country houses and holiday homes sit empty for most of the year.

Former president of the Irish Auctioneers & Valuers Institute Gerry Slattery, of Warren Estates in Gorey, Co Wexford, looks askance at the trend of mortgaging yourself to the hilt in order to buy more and more property and to furnish it more and more lavishly. "Some people justify this by the romantic fantasy of having a summer place for the children, but such idylls usually lasts only a few summers before the children become teenagers and prefer to remain in Dublin. So the country house lies empty, until the children marry, when they start fighting over the property and the grandparents hardly get to use it."

Most investors Slattery sees are not wealthy, but merely well-off as a result of the property boom. They have seen the residences they purchased 10 years ago rocket in value and instead of remaining happily there, counting their money, they re-mortgage on the new value and use the money to buy property elsewhere. It seems logical, until you think of the enormous strain that families are under to pay the large mortgages, especially when couples are forced to maintain two incomes. If one spouse were to become sick and unable to work? What then?, Slattery asks.

Meanwhile, while some people have more property than they know what to do with, others cannot even get their foot on the bottom rung of the ladder.

Geraldine, a manager in a fencing business in Co Wicklow, frowns as she measures yet another property for yet another fence which will keep the neighbours from each others' throats. The wall she's measuring today belongs to a couple who have bought a house for their children as an investment for the future, because if things keep going like this, their children will not be able to afford their own houses. "It's not fair," Geraldine says as she lets her metal measuring tape snap shut. "Some people have two or three houses and I can't even afford to buy one."

To her, it rankles that a substantial portion of the property-owning population can afford to buy more than one property while a substantial portion of renters, earning good incomes, as much as £30,000 per annum, cannot afford to buy even basic accommodation.

It's the ultimate irony that with our collective Irish history of being thrown off the land, half of us are now relishing our status as land-owners while the other half are seem condemned to pay rent for ever. Instead of remedying the injustices of the past, we're playing them out once again.