HOUSE HUNTER:We may be near the last stop at Café NAMA – but the march goes on. We're tempted by newbuilds – but not ready to buy, writes DON MORGAN
TRYING to buy a house in Dublin has been a bit of dud. Hey ho, can’t be helped and all of that. I can give out as much as I want about Dublin, the property industry and all of that caper. I can make jokes about developers re-enacting the end of Downfall, the Russians temporarily stopping off at Café NAMA for a skinny vodka latte on their way to destiny. For me though, the march goes on. And we have to get moving somehow.
I keep carping on about Dublin being a slightly provincial, undernurtured capital city of a country whose economy is about as sophisticated as James Bond ordering a can of Scrumpy Jack.
The fact is that I have a love-hate relationship with Dublin. The Dublin I love is full of warmth among its inhabitants, is full of banter, informality and great music. It has its flaws, but people are happy and will rough it because they’re in good company.
Unfortunately that Dublin existed 20 years ago, and I was a child. The Dublin I left had become self-conscious, wracked with self-hatred. It deserted its Dublin-Dunkirk spirit which was its charm. It was a place that made me sad.
People embraced the uncomfortable scenario of wearing Louboutin shoes hoping people wouldn’t notice that you probably didn’t deserve them, and that soon the jig would be up.
You’d never get that cocktail of arrogance and dread in Cork. They’d be hoping youd notice the heels. We lost ourselves to notional wealth with a Westlife soundtrack mewling in the background.
But for all of that, I just can’t wait: the last number of times I’ve been in Dublin, its old, happy-angry soul seems to have mysteriously returned. It’s amazing what a touch of recession can do for the soul.
Every day during the commute, while we were dodging pileups on the great M50 slalom, we would come up for air by a roadside ad for newbuilds near Rathfarnham. We steadfastly ignored the ad, because the houses were beyond our catchment area and living in Dublin meant making the car an option, not a necessity. And the M50, well, that’s the driver’s equivalent of San Quentin Prison.
However, we were in desperate need of an antidote to the raft of wrecks we saw in Grannyland, where each house more resembled the end of Psycho than the last. Rathfarnham, although once a village, is now a constituent part of a great suburban splat. It’s the place I first felt mortal in, and given the gridlock there during rush hour, that feeling might just come back to haunt me.
The two houses we looked at, a three and a four-bed terraced, were beautiful, bright, clean, well built, and at 400k, reasonably affordable. The kitchen was done out to such an obscenely high-spec condition, that my Home Economics teacher missus dropped to her knees, muttering what I can only surmise was a dark prayer. All I could make out was “Delia be thy name”, so I kept on snooping. Both houses were wired for surroundsound, if that’s your thing, a plus. The livingroom was a tad small, but wouldn’t have seemed as such had the back garden not been so small.
It would suit us now, but what if we had kids? How many cigarettes would Maureen have to smoke during pregnancy to keep our issue in scale with the garden?
What newbuilds offer, and these ones did with aplomb, was user friendliness. Everything’s done, the kitchen came as seen. Just short of offering you diamonds to place in your bath, there wasn’t a whole lot more they could do to sweeten the deal.
It works for us now. It looks like good value now. We’d need a second car, though, and we can’t afford that as of yet. Consumer confidence is the big issue.
We didn’t have any, because in a development which wasn’t sold out, and which was a bit further out, would the property depreciate too far? The houses were lovely, but with our confidence waning, we wouldn’t take that kind of risk.
