propertypin posts, noel o'gara, nama, planning laws, planning reform

Posted by Noel O'Gara on the www.propertypin forum on 1st August 2009. under the name themainman.

The massive herd of white elephants approved by our faceless bureaucratic planners for their developer friends and financed by foolish bankers who were lulled into a false sense of security by the government are now an increasingly visible sight on the landscape of every city, town and even some villages throughout the twenty six counties as they become more evident day by day.

Many fully developed ones are still part vacant and produce little income but cost money to secure and maintain.
The adolescent ones will probably never mature because the music has stopped.
There are hundreds perhaps thousands still on the drawing boards waiting for the start but will never rear their heads from the development land which cost billions.
Now they are to be all herded into NAMA to relieve the banks of terminal indigestion, not to save the banks but to save the economy of the country which would close down if the banks closed their doors.

One has only to trawl through daft.ie and pick any county or town to view these creatures.
http://www.daft.ie/sales/

The really sad thing is that this massive stock of unsustainable development which now overhangs the market has totally undermined the existing older stock of commercial and residential buildings in the state and will cause them to be devalued both in income terms and consequently in capital value as the elephants are offered at give away prices just to get them occupied at any price rather than let them deteriorate or succumb to vandalism or worse.

Brian Lenihan's fake optimism in the light of this scenario is laughable. Who is he fooling?

It is indeed an apalling vista and is all due to the greed of the developers who were happy to give dig-outs to Bertie and others and visit the Galway tent to pay homage to their political fixers.

Seven years of profligate greed by a few has undermined more than a hundred years of hard work of the Irish business community and it will result in more ghost towns, ghost streets and ghost housing estates up and down the country as it unfolds.

Building to the beat of planners permissions rather than building specific buildings to meet market demand has perverted the market place and turned it on its head.

When Mr Mc paid 90 million per acre to buy the Burlington hotel, one of the best amenities in Dublin intending to replace it with flats and offices, how was it that nobody in our government noticed there was something amiss with the tiger? Who could blame the Doyles for taking a price that would buy five hotels of equal potential for that one? Nobody saw the delusional behaviour only them???

When the banks sold off most of their buildings did nobody in government ask why? The big solid buildings they occupied were used to instill confidence in the public putting their hard earned cash into them.

When the shopping centres outside towns started to drain the life out of the towns and cities, did nobody ever recognise that a lake will run dry if you drain it?

The tax breaks and schemes the government devised to encourage phantom communities all along the coast must have raised eyebrows when nobody lived in them??

etc etc.

Picture the scene last September when the heads of the main banks requested an emergency meeting with the fledgling finance minister who has little or no experience of business and confessed to him that all the Irish banks and building societies were flat broke and they were unable to pay their creditors. They grudgingly conceded that they had overlent to booming developers who were now unable to repay their loans and as a consequence the banks were unable to meet their own commitments to creditors and were afraid of a run on the banks like the Northern Rock run which had sent jitters through them.
Brian Lehihan must have pinched himself and thought he was dreaming.

Lenihan told the press
"Were liquidity to dry up in the Irish banking system in the weeks ahead, the inevitable result would be economic catastrophe for this country. We are a small exposed economy, one that is more globally exposed than any economy in any other member state in the EU. For us not to have a viable banking system would paralyse the trade of this country and reduce us to a powerless position in all the markets in which we buy and sell our goods and services,"
He gave that 500 billion guarantee that is meaningless anyway. Then the blame game started. The banks became the whipping boys.
Money is the oil that lubricates and runs the whole country. The banks are the arteries of that oil.
It matters not how deep the 'haircut' Mr Lenihan gives to the banks because the whole purpose of the exercise is to keep the banks in existance simply because without the banks our country is banjaxed. NAMA is just a device or a smokescreen to save the banks in order to save the country. If they closed their doors nobody could access their money or do any business, so it is vital to save them and the government knows that.
Commentators debate the level of values but it matters not. The name of the exercise is to take the bad loans off the banks so that they are just not weighed down by the debt and can function as banks and the public can retain confidence in them and leave their money on deposit and hope they return to normal business.
Their bad loan losses or doubtful debts far outweigh their abilty to remain solvent which is why the government need to take that burden off their backs to allow them to remain in business.
Their net worth or capital or equity has been wiped out and they are actually bankrupt but the government cant let them go or the country is gone with them.
Therefore we need NAMA to enable them to continue. If values drop because of Carroll then NAMA will reflect that but regardless the banks will be left just about floating.

you are all going off topic lads. Never mind what should happen theoretically and recoginse that the country is actually in the sh...e.

In one year we might be looking at mass emigration and coupons for food financed by massive taxation while FF still point the way out of the mess for you all.

I am showing how it got there and offering a solution.
The elephant in the kitchen is what you should be talking about because that produced the massive herd of white elephants and you still havent asked where the elephant is standing because you are so familiar with it.

I'm talking about the planning laws where the whole planning and development of all building was taken over by state bureaucrats called planners, and the land owners and visionary developers were put in harness under their control.
Architects, engineers and lawyers all joined the gravy train and feasted out of that bucket until now we see the herds of white elephants that it produced.

I think we can kill the Idea of letting the banks fail. It just won't work. Check the amounts on deposit in the Banks annual reports, they are too big to invoke a guarantee.

agreed and that is why Brian Lenihan has resorted to NAMA. He really had no choice or the country would be a basket case if the banks closed their doors.

Whatever happens we are in dire straits and the huge stock of unlet and unwanted property both residential and commercial that overhangs the market is going to have a debilitating effect on the rest of the real estate value and rentals. As a consequence the tax take will diminish as Ireland inc implodes and we are all the worse off. The losses have been made and we are all going to pay for them and the cause of it all was taking the market forces away from the land owner/developer and putting the planners in control of the market.
Nobody wants to admit to that grave sin yet because so many profited out of it.

The Kilternan white elephant, one of that rare species that cannot work but will now cost a lot to fodder and care for, was bestowed on Mr O'Regan by the planners who slowed down the development and gave it their blessing after extracting a lot of money from him as a contribution to keeping them in office.

The season of white elephants is upon us and NAMA ensures we all end up paying for them.

but if O'Regan was not so confined by the planning laws, such a bright spark of a businessman with a successful track record would have had his options open to acquire a strategic and much better site somewhere else in this little republic from a landowner, so that he could pursue his dreams without the heavy hand of bureaucracy pressing down on every innovation he comes up with.
Planning problems and restrictions amount to a virtual total bloc on all innovation so he chose to revive a white elephant because it existed and planning would not present a problem or such insurmountable problems as many a developer found out.
Face it grumpy, we live in a socialist bureaucracy run by idiots, not a republic of free people as our founders intended.

At least Matt Cooper on Today FM managed to get a dig in by asking him if he would be giving tips on the horse racing, given his success as a punter in Manchester. [/quote]

My reply.

you can see how he screwed up this state now but when the gravy train was rolling you lads all voted him in and wouldnt say a bad word about him.
Bertie was planning all the developments of the country with his council officials and quangos when he should have been above planning matters and looking at the overall picture of a nation's financial and social stability and its place in international affairs. He had his nose stuck in the airport which has a state monopoly, in Aer Lingus, in Croke Park, the Bertiebowl and many others and his daily work was meeting with developers rather than doing his job of overseeing the economy.

The planning laws gave all that to the politicians and took property development away from the visionary businessmen and builders who would have supplied a sustainable supply to the market based on demand.

Bertie resigned when he saw the gigantic financial tsunami coming across the Atlantic and annointed Cowan his most vehement and loud mouthed side kick to his job in order to shield him from all blame. Cowan was an unelected leader and Bertie's best pal. He has echoed Bertie's cry that the banks were to blame but you all know now that it was the politicians who screwed us and who will ride us until we drop.

Bertie resigned when he saw what was coming down the tracks. Try reading this
http://www.independent.ie/national-news ... 44942.html
Why would Cowan be invited to a dinner by the Anglo Irish Bank directors, his friend must surely have briefed him about Sean Quinn's massive losses.
He had only been nominated Taoiseach in waiting a few weeks before.
Bertie must have been briefed about the Anglo debacle which threatened the financial stability of the nation just a few weeks prior and he saw that train thundering down the tracks long before the media got hold of it. He had a taste of the American crisis since Paddy's day in washington.
Events at the Tribunals wouldnt knock a stir out of him and never revealed anything extra that would have forced him to throw the towel in.
Because of the seriousness of the situation I would say that Anglo would have had to meet up with the Taoiseach and the Regulator before the golden circle was contrived. The regulator seems to have been a totally incompetant bureaucrat who never performed a meaningful job.
Bertie moved Cowan into the hot seat and got out fast.

Anglo precipitated the banking crisis in Ireland and Quinn precipitated the collapse of Anglo shares when he stopped buying and as a result they started to fall off the radar.
There are a lot of skeletons still in that Anglo cupboard and NAMA is a device that will keep them locked away.

Its no fiction that Bertie resigned without warning or any political heave. Its not fiction that he appointed Cowan much to the annoyance of some other politicians. Its not fiction that Anglo was recognised to be a walking dead bank just at the time of Bertie's departure with massive losses that swamped the Irish economy and were unprecedented in scale.
Its not fiction that Sean Quinn was in a sweat when he told Fitzpatrick that he was broke and couldnt pay for the shares he bought on his casino run of bad luck.
Its not fiction that Fitz called in An Taoiseach and his Regulator to tell them that Ireland Inc was on the brink of economic disaster unless he came up with a plan to save the bank from going down the tubes.
Since that time everything has been downhill and its gathering momentum as we write.

Not alone did he suddenly decide to resign but he had the cheek to elect his successor, the most vocal and belligerent man in the party who would cover his ass. and all the dummies in the party were too weak to insist on their right to elect a new party leader.

Mr Karl Whelan economist is spouting top class hogwash. If you believe that you would believe anything. Whelan doesnt understand that the banks have the state stuffed. We are not just broke. We are swamped beyond any possible bank recovery and recovery is not possible because we have cocked it up totally and we are bust as a nation. Not only is their capital base wiped out but there is a deficit of many times that, all of which will go into NAMA.

The ship is holed and taking water

Guys like Whelan seem to believe that there is a magic solution where you can loose much more than your entire fortune one minute and then win it back by good management the next minute with a few strokes.

First stroke, the guarantees by the government are hot air and not worth the paper they are written on. They havent enough to pay their own wages in the public service let alone the interest on those massive losses going to be shelved at NAMA.

If the banks closed their doors big businesses would not have the means of getting paid by their debtors and couldnt pay wages so there would be instant mass unemployment, no social welfare payments and civil unrest would start immediately. Gardai with no pay. Army on martial law with no pay.
To avoid that nightmare our government have embarked on the only option open to them, a flim flam of lies about NAMA being a temporary repository of those wonderful assets that were overvalued but just wait for them to mature to profit. Lenihan is on a tight wire trying to bluster his way through it and if he falls off it we are all stuffed because you voted for them and enjoyed the ride on that phantom tiger. Its back to the land and the horse and car and allotments in the towns and cities.
People might finally recognise what central planning by bureaucrats has done to the country. If you were Cowan or Lenihan or Bertie would you tell the punters the truth about how you destroyed a great nation or continue bullshitting them until the ship goes down?

Bear in mind that while people were dropping dead with the hunger during the famine times there were others with good land selling their corn and oats to merchants who were exporting it wholesale. Porridge could have saved the people but the powers didnt want that.
While they travelled the roads in rags there were others looking on who could have helped but didnt.
There was a building boom in Dublin in the 1860's when there was mass poverty in the rural areas and labourers were given jaw wages. So forget about the voters because the political parties are all equally dim and only hungry for power, for power's sake.
If the captain told the passengers that the ship was taking on water and will sink in 6 hours there would be panic. Cowan and Lenihan are just too dim to absorb that but this ship is sinking under the weight of those white elephants that FF planned for all you lads and you let them carry on planning your future.
Check out your security and food supply because the shops might soon be like the shelves in Russia after the wall came down. Meanwhile our politicians are rearranging the deck chairs and like Bertie are planning get out strategies for themselves. When the shit hits the fan they will jump and not even tell you.

I proposed a solution in late 2008 that would have worked had it been implemented but unfortunately we are ruled by barristers and lawyers who dont know anything about real business and the vagaries of negotiating in the real world.
Its no use raking over the coals trying to see what we should have done ten years ago.
The rest of your post is pure academy and ok in the school room.

Our state had a level playing field prior to 1964 when the planning laws put all development into the hands of bureaucrats who had no knowledge of the land or what it was to make money.
They and the politicians of all parties have all failed the people miserably.
If we are ever to recover as a nation we must radically reform the planning laws so that the business people make the decisions on what to build and where to build it. Basic laws of supply and demand will dictate the development needed and there can then be no manipulation of the market place if we keep the politicians out of it with their schemes and scams that have driven this small state into bankruptcy from which we might never recover as an independant nation.
All our stock of housing and commercial buildings were built to meet the demands of the day by businessmen who saw the oppertunity and invested in them.
Planners who live in ivory towers have planned the celtic tiger and the result is a massive stock of unusable buildings that will drag the rest of the market down and hold it down for years to come.
I have yet to hear any criticism of the planners or the planning system, the elephant in the room who conceived the massive herd of white elephants that now dot the landscape.

Knowledge of land is something nearly every land owner understands. All land is different and has many uses depending on its location and the owner's ideas. Thats what freedom is about.
When planners start to tell you what you can or cannot do on your land then you are in airy fairy land where we are all right now.
ps I dont watch movies.

Brian Lehihan cannot for the life of him and his political party tell the Irish public that the nation is bankrupt and sinking into a financial morass.
That would be political hara kiri and unthinkable for our noble warriors. We Irish lack a sense of responsibility as a nation.
It is vitally necessary to maintain the banks existance because they are the arteries through which the money that gives life to the economy, flows.
Therefore he took Bacon's solution and invented NAMA. The banks will be allowed to exist with just enough capital to float and lots of hope but without that weight of debt that makes them hopelessly bankrupt as they now are.
This creature will become a repository for all those losses or toxic debts or whatever you want to call them just to preserve the banks which would otherwise close their doors. Everybody's savings would be lost forever and it would be back to the land and allotments for urban dwellers.
That is the nightmare scenario he cannot tell us about because he and his mates Cowan, Bertie and co caused it.

Commentators dont seem to understand the purpose of NAMA and continue to debate the valuations of assets etc without recognising that the purpose of NAMA is simply to transfer all the bank's losses into one big pot to be set aside and financed by massive government borrowing that will swamp the taxpayers with a massive annual interest bill.
Its about FF trying to cling on to power by throwing a flimsy lifebelt to a drowning man after walking him into the deep.
Fianny Gael and Labour cannot solve the mess either but like all politicians they bullshit that they can do better.
They all distorted the market for all property and undermined it with planning laws that restricted land owners and developers from supplying what the market demanded. Government schemes, planning and zoning and consequent corruption has cocked the country up completely and now we are looking into the abyss with a supply of houses and commercial white elephants that is undermining and devaluing all the existing older stock of buildings and placing a burden on the state that will be felt by all.

Hopefully that will explain the valuations to be placed on the white elephants necessary to keep the banks doors open because if they close we are all stuffed.

2nd Post on this thread.

Most public service workers get paid through the banks monthly. Most commercial companies and businesses pay their workers through their bank accounts, weekly or monthly. Most businesses and individuals pay their bills by cheque and accept cheques from each other.
Traditionally thrifty people saved their money in the banks rather than under the matress. So all those people who have money, have it invested in the banks earning interest.
If the banks closed, those depositors would lose all their money and people with mortgages would have nobody to pay. It would be the end of capitalism.
Traditionally banks lent the depositors savings out to entrepreneurs at higher interest rates and that was how they made a profit.
Loans were leveraged so that they could safely lend out several times what they held on deposit without running the risk of a run on the bank if savers panicked and suddenly wanted their money back.
Most savers left their money there indefinetly and that bred complacency by the banks which led to them taking risks to make more money with other types of lending.
They developed derivitive trading, Nick Leeson style, which effectively means they were playing roulette with depositors money.

What had traditionally been the most conservative of institutions became casinos because of US style bonuses that were geared to profit and risk taking.
Government and regulators failed to see these developments and prevent them.

Credit unions and building societies have most of their money in the banks also so they are as I said the arteries through which flows the life blood of economic activity or the oil that lubricates all commercial activity.
We would be back to barter and peasant farming without them.

Dream on. The only thing saving Ireland Inc thus far is the fact that we are tied into the Euro club. Our Euro partners must be looking for ways to ditch us and Lisbon may provide that.

We have become a danger to the greater European project because of our recklesness in building so much unsustainable houses and commercial buildings which Europe will now have to support by loans to nurse us along. That will of course mean that our sovereignity as a nation is shot because we are in hock.

The underlying cause of the debacle is unsustainable development built to the drumbeat of planners permissions distorted by schemes, bribes and tax breaks rather than built to meet demand in a level playing field.
Builders raced to build if they got planning permission as if that was a guarantee that the houses would sell.
Planners only considered roads, bribes, sewers and water etc etc. These bureaucrats knew nothing about sustainability or demand and spiralling cost meant nothing to them.

Now NAMA will be the repository for all those bad loans to builders so that the banks can survive. Valuations or haircuts as they refer to the discounts, are not so much important as to save the banks. Its panic stations and in that situation one resorts to extreme measures as a drowning man will grasp any straw.

If our politicians ever waken up, you will know it when they cut their own salaries by half. Until that day, dream on into the abyss.
Some lone voices did cry in the wilderness but got no votes and no oppertunity to put their case to the people.

Post dated 19th August.

Subject Rumour 'one off housing to be banned'

Tacobel wrote

Rural people don't "own" the country side, no more than urban dwellers "own" the city. I'm not sure where you're getting this us/them mentality from.

My reply,

The struggle for national self determination of the Irish people was mainly a struggle for the ownership and control of the land. Irish people are mainly a rural folk who were sustained over the centuries by what they extracted from the land in crops and lifestock products. Post the famine trauma, land ownership became more and more a pressing issue of life and death.
When we finally got the land after murder and mayhem and got most of the British landlords to give up their grip on it we divided it out amongst the farmers who were landless and the ones who rented their farms from British landlords became the owners on their own small holdings subject to the rents then payable to the Irish Land Commission.
A Dublin house owner was free to do as he wishes with his home or land/garden or that was the thinking behind their support for the struggle for liberation and they achieved that. Then after all that struggle against the British administration our very own FF leadership brought the planning laws on to the statute books in 1964 that took all our ownership rights to develop away from us at a stroke and we accepted it because at that time nobody had money to develop anyway so there was little resistance.

If you look at our constitution of 1937, property rights are fully respected and that was incorporated into the Planning laws section 4, where you will see that there was an exemption for agriculture and any buildings used for that purpose but that is little known today.

In fact any Irishman can build a house for himself on his land without permission, if it is used for that purpose.

Actually I have done just that and informed the local council but they never came near me.

You must all be well aware that it was the planners and the developers who have screwed up this great nation with seven years of unsustainable building that took no cognisance of the market demand and now we have so much surplus housing stock that it is undermining the rental and capital value of all the traditional old buildings, not to mention making us a bankrupt nation.

So urban dwellers do own their city or their corner of it but they have allowed the councils and in particular the socialist or landless to dominate the landscape and demand free housing into the bargain. The republic has become a socialist republic with everybody owning everything or pretending they do and screwing up the lot of it.
Remember it was the planners who designed Ballymun and Moyross, just two of their older white elephants while landowners in every age built houses to meet the budgets of all buyers rich or poor.

Post dated 21st August 2009.

Subject Repugnant to the Constitution.

The planning laws enacted in 1964 were repugnant to our constitution and they were never challenged in the supreme court.
They undermined the right to own property by the individual and put all use of property and land in the hands of bureaucrats and planners and they together with their political masters have produced this herd of white elephants that we now see crystallising all over the landscape and which have bankrupted this nation.
Looking for solutions now is futile.
As a nation we are screwed and waiting to be squeezed more and more.
Our FF leaders have screwed up big time and no legal changes or strategems can get us out of the mess we are in.

To re establish a stable market we must dump the planning laws as a priority but nobody has addressed that elephant in the room yet.

Duisigh replied.

Correct. Because people [ including businesses in the legal 'person' sense ] had a tendency to build shite, either poorly architected, badly/inappropriately sited or with no thought at all beyond an immediate profit . Those laws were intended to stop that.

My Reply.

That was the mantra of the law makers who brought the planning laws into being.

Just look at the record of white elephants that they produced. Start with Ballymun, Fatima Mansions, Tallagh before the roads were finished and shops and schools built.

How about the shite that was built before the planning laws came in?

They have that shite all as protected structures and listed buildings. The last thing any developer wanted was a white elephant that he couldnt rent out or sell but the planners forced builders to mass produce those creatures.
The architects never criticised the planning laws because they grew fat on the work that was heaped upon them and kept silent about the madness of the planners.

Builders in the celtic tiger era went mad with greed as they knocked up' shite , poorly architected and badly/inapporpriately sited with no thought at all beyond an immediate profit' to paraphrase you.
Sure, the planning laws stopped the builders from competing to sell good quality houses where a badly designed or finished house would be unsold if there were better houses down the road.
The cowboy builder thought that if he got planning he was guaranteed to sell and they were until the bubble burst.

metalmike wrote. Noel O'Gara should be appointed patron saint of the Celtic Tiger - he is the epitome of all it stood for.

My Reply.

you are quite delusional in that statement because the celtic tiger was a period of massive house and property inflation that went hand in glove with developers getting planning permissions for apartment blocks and housing schemes that they built as quickly as possible and used mortgage brokers who were often the same retained auctioneers who sold them in order to arrange finance to help young couples to buy them in a hyped scramble of euphoria.

O'Gara never looked for planning permission, neither bought nor built any houses or flats in those years. He recognised that the planning laws had distorted the market place and Ireland was rushing headlong into an unsustainable housing free for all because planners were handing out permissions for a pyramid of houses that could never be occupied and would cost the earth because of the high price of zoned land and planning and related fees.
He tried to shout stop but nobody listened to him or voted for him because they were much too interested in getting in on the act to get rich with house inflation.
When he put his name down for the election the media ignored his assertions about planning and never gave him airspace to put the case.
They repeated that in the recent byelection when they hyped George Lee as the chosen one with blanket coverage and George was and is a perfect academic with no experience of business.
O'Gara used Dartmouth Square to show how the planning laws had taken all rights from the landowner and how the judiciary blindly back the bureaucracy. The media portrayed him as taking the park from the children when the council actually stole two houses from him and for several years havent compensated him but try to put his title down and render it worthless.

So O'G was not in it for the money. He showed up how ridiculous the land values were when he asked for 175 million for the square because McNamara paid 90 million an acre for the Burlington just at that time. He knew those prices were totally off the wall and unsustainable and he told all who would listen but you got the media spin because you couldnt see the real game.
He didnt want to sell it for any price because he doesnt want the money. He has enough to get by.

the patron saints should be Dunne, McNamara and his band as well as the planners.

Some of my posts have been removed from the propertypin website because they were not politically correct and have moderators who try to control the agenda to suit their own purposes or just because they dont want to hear or allow to be heard, views that conflict with their own.

HAVE THE PRESENT GENERATIONS OF IRISHMEN AND WOMEN FORGOTTEN THAT THE DRIVING FORCE IN THE STRUGGLE FOR NATIONAL SELF DETERMINATION WAS THE NEED TO OWN THE LAND? HAVING ACHIEVED THIS GOAL AFTER SO MUCH HARDSHIP AND STRUGGLE BY OUR PARENTS AND GRANDPARENTS, HOW DID THE PRESENT GENERATION ALLOW THE BUREAUCRACY TO ASSUME ALL RIGHTS TO THE USE OF THE LAND FOR EVERYTHING FROM PARKING YOUR CAR ON IT TO PITCHING A TENT ON IT.

THE ECONOMIC FAILURE NOW LOOMING ON THE HORIZON IS PROOF THAT THIS WAS TOTAL FAILURE WHICH WILL LEAVE US ALL POORER FOR GENERATIONS TO COME NOT TO MENTION THE NATIONAL HUMILIATION AND LOSS OF SOVEREIGNTY THAT FINANCIAL RUIN BRINGS ON US ALL.

THE ONLY WAY FORWARD MUST BE A RETURN TO THE PEOPLE OF THEIR RIGHT TO BE OWNERS OF THEIR LAND AND THAT WILL ENSURE MARKET FORCES WILL PREVAIL RATHER THAN PLANNERS' DREAMS AND GOVERNMENT SCHEMES FOR EVERYTHING THEY UNDERTOOK, DREAMS AND SCHEMES THAT HAVE UNDERMINED US ALL.