Sir, - Recently one of our leading property sellers advertised a house for sale in a south Dublin suburb. The house was advertised as needing refurbishment and with a mature garden. To state that it needed refurbishment was an understatement - it was uninhabitable; and the garden, far from being mature, was a wilderness of brambles through which a path had been hacked. This property achieved the astronomical sum of £575,000 at auction. To me, this was an outrage, a moral sin, and it is only one of many being perpetrated in the housing market.
How can mortgages be obtained for such properties? How can such high mortgages be available when the supposed rate is two-and-a-half times a person's salary? If mortgages are not available, then only speculators can be involved. When are our Government, building societies and banks going to get together to address this very pressing housing problem and make properties available at realistic prices? At present there must be very many brown envelopes passing from hand to hand.
As for the latest suggestion that parents will have to help their offspring with house purchases, where are the parents of 50, 60, 70 years of age with perhaps two or three children going to find that kind of money when even their pensions are taxed? Are the proposers of these suggestions suffering from some rare disease that has not yet been diagnosed? - Yours, etc.,
H. J. Beckett, Green Road, Blackrock, Co Dublin.