Oh to have a little house . . . with electric gates and four en suites

TalkingProperty: Returning emigrants, out of touch with the Irish property market, may find that there have been significant changes. Michael Parsons takes a trip

"Oh, to have a little house!" sighed "an old woman of the roads" in Padraic Colum's well-loved poem. She'd get short shrift these days from estate agents. Not many people, especially in rural Ireland, aspire to a little house.

There you are driving along, outside Gorey say, or Thurles, when whoosh, suddenly looming like the spaceship in Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a sprawling mansion bang on the side of a secondary road with a gleaming new "People Carrier" smirking on the tarmacadamed drive.

Who on earth could possibly need such a large house in these days of shrinking family sizes? The style is unmistakeably "Studfork" - a fusion of Dallas Suburban and mock Tudor. Think J.R. Ewing and the "build-me-something-classy-godammit" school of architecture.

It looks as if it could very well be the residence of a nouveau ambassador - Lithuania's perhaps? - and you wonder, momentarily, if the silken-tongued Mr. Parlon has managed to cajole the diplomatic corps into joining the decentralisation jolly. So you discreetly enquire among the locals.

But no, it's not the official residence of His Excellency, nor even the dacha of his Russian counterpart. It is "Jim's house". "And what, pray, does Jim do?" you ask - fully expecting to hear that this local bigwig is, at the very least, a Tribunal barrister or the offshore accounts manager of a major bank.

"He drives a lorry for the quarry above" replies the friendly barman. Jim's front lawn - on which is plonked a trampoline the size of a flying saucer - is bigger than the grounds of Walford (of Shrewsbury Road, not EastEnders fame) and a quad bike is required to travel out to its herbaceous borders.

There's a water feature, burbling from a cast-bronze wishing well, and a conservatory to rival the Palm House at Kew.

How on earth can they afford it? - you wonder as you sip your bitter-sweet Smithwick's and think forlornly of the shoebox you viewed with enthusiasm last week in "one of the Capital's most prestigious developments" - on the Kildare border - and priced at just under a million.

As the evening wears on you find out, when Jim himself walks in. He got the site from the "oul fella" for free and used direct labour -"meself and the brother-in-law" - that's Shay, a blocklayer built like a Humvee, who commutes daily to Dublin where he earns "a euro a block" and works for himself at weekends.

Later, Jim is happy to show you around. Almost blinded by the gleam of polished porcelain in the "four en-suites" you arrive in a "lounge" the size of the ballroom at Versailles. Here you sink into a "champagne-coloured" leather recliner - so comfy - and there's one each for all the family!

"How big is the house" you ask glumly. "Ah, she's about 3,000 square foot" he says.

When you tell him the pitiful dimensions of the "house" you viewed in Dublin, Jim's attention turns from the plasma screen of a home-cinema system and he regards you with a mixture of pity and contempt.

"Sure the young one's rabbit hutch is bigger than that" he laughs. "You're some eejit", the brother-in-law chimes in, not unreasonably, as he fetches cold cans of beer from an enormous double-door American fridge.

Travel further around the country and you'll discover that the old lady's vision of domestic bliss is distinctly old-hat. Her penchant for "The heaped-up sods upon the fire,

The pile of turf against the wall" has been replaced by a fashion for underfloor heating and her "dresser filled with shining delph,

Speckled and white and blue and brown!" would certainly spoil the cool clean lines of a new Shaker kitchen with its gleaming Neff appliances, John Rocha glassware and Nicholas Mosse pottery.

At least though, "weary of the mist and dark", our old dear of yesteryear would no longer fear "roads where there's never a house nor bush" - not with one-offs and ribbon developments. In any case location wasn't important to her.

How quaint! She just wanted a house "Out of the wind and the rain's way." The poor craythur might really be better off looking elsewhere -like offshore.

And if her meanderings had taken her onto the N9 outside Carlow recently she might very well have found what she so dearly craved at an agreeably affordable price.

Roadside hoardings proclaimed a "Turkish Property Exhibition" in the village of Leighlinbridge.

Buy your dream home on the Lycian coast and you may find that the neighbours are young Turks from Clonegal.

Something a bit more stylish? New apartments being promoted to Irish investors in Poland tout their location as the "Dublin South" of Warsaw while others are deemed to be in "the Dublin 4 of the Hungarian capital" - the new designation for Budapest's 5th District.

Hands up - without looking at an atlas please - can you place Cape Verde? The cluster-of-islands State is one of the latest hotspots being promoted to Irish holiday-home buyers.

"Only 90 minutes flying time south of the Canaries", the former Portuguese colony is, in fact, off the west coast of Africa. Villas and apartments are for sale on the island of Sal - with prices from a piddling €100,000.

On the neighbouring island of Santiago there are plots for sale, on which you may build your dream villa, with prices starting at a derisory €68,000 - a sum for which a Dublin plumber would hardly get out of bed in the morning.

Senegal is just a short hop away - by plane - if you need a good supermarket.