Frank Fahey needs to come clean

... or the government will fall.

Rumours have been rife for some time now of a Fianna Fail TD being a member of the so-called 'Maple Ten' investors who bought Anglo Irish bank shares with Anglo Irish's own money, pretty much unsecured, which then helped Anglo prop up their share price last Autumn.

Those rumours continually name only one TD - Frank Fahey (image courtesy of the ever marvellous Green Ink). Now, firstly it must be said that there is currently no evidence of wrongdoing by the Maple Ten. They haven't benefited from their investment since the bank was subsequently nationalised.

Secondly, I must also add that I have no knowledge of any of the ten investors involved. The Sunday Times has named four people they allege are involved and suggest heavily about the identities of two more. Frank Fahey's name is not among them, nor is that of any other TD, Fianna Fail or otherwise.

I am therefore not saying that Frank Fahey is involved in this, and even if it transpires that he is, that in itself is not currently evidence of any wrongdoing.

I personally see the identities of these ten as a sideshow. The real issue with Anglo is whether banking officials themselves were breaking the law, in relation to this deal which appears only to have served the purpose of propping up the share price and misleading the market, and also in relation to directors' loans.

There is a wider issue about whether the government, the regulator, or indeed the people of Ireland were misled when they nationalised Anglo Irish. And that issue is the most important of all, since that bank could now cost us - the people - over 5.3 billion euro in bad debts alone, never mind the piddling 300 million that these particular ten individuals have had written off.

But all last week in the Dail, Fine Gael, who may well have heard similar rumours as me, pushed the Taoiseach and Minister for Finance to assure the house that no government TD was involved in the ten.

And the Taoiseach offered such assurances.

If it subsequently transpires that Frank Fahey, or any other Fianna Fail TD, was involved in this contrary to the assurances of the Taoiseach, mere sacking from the party won't contain the anger of the public.

With a Fianna Fail Ard Feis next weekend, the Government majority party could possibly find themselves facing a very angry crowd of protestors anyway as they go for their annual booze up at CityWest.

How much angrier might that crowd be if it had emerged that one of the ten investors in Anglo was, contrary to the Taoiseach's assurances, a Fianna Fail TD? I genuinely think the government would fall as a result.

Fahey does attract ire in certain quarters. People are unimpressed with how he was involved in the Rossport affair at the outset, and some question his amassing of a massive international property empire at a time when he was expected to be representing those who elected him.

Therefore, it is now incumbent on Frank Fahey to come out and state categorically whether he was in any way linked to or involved in this investment, if he actually cares about his party, the government of which he is a member, and the nation at large.

Finding a filling station

Looking to fill up your car with petrol in Ireland? I wish you the best of luck.

Never mind the long-standing suspicion among motorists that the majority of filling stations operate cartel pricing practices.

It's simply finding a petrol station that's becoming the problem these days. The Consumers Association is becoming concerned at the lack of competition in the petrol market, and their concern is mild compared to that of motorists.

Ten years ago there were 2,500 petrol stations in the Republic of Ireland. Today, there are fewer than half that number. And that's despite the fact that an average of 170,000 new cars have been registered in Ireland each year since 1999.

So, if we have many more cars on the road, why are there fewer petrol stations, rather than more?

One reason is property speculation. The ever-spiralling cost of property in Ireland has led many petrol station owners to cash in on the large footprint of their forecourts.

You'd be hard pushed to find a single station left in large swathes of the south Dublin suburbs anymore. They've all been sold off for development into yet more boxy apartments.

But here's another reason. Shell and Statoil are currently involved in taking up to €400 billion of gas and oil resources from the Irish people. They struck a deal with our corrupt government to take all of our natural resources and pay nothing in return. What a deal! Some might call it stealing, but to Shell it's just the deal of the century.

Now when some people in Rossport, concerned at the safety or otherwise having a high pressure gas pipeline running past their living rooms, started protesting this decision, Shell and Statoil did what any greedy multinational would do.

They sacrificed their forecourt operations in order to safeguard their mammoth offshore freebie windfall. They sold off their petrol stations, in other words, because protests and boycotts were beginning to happen.

Much easier to dispose of those troublesome assets at a profit rather than face down the legitimate anger of the Irish people whose wealth and future security they have taken for nothing.

So the next time you're cruising the streets, your fuel guage in the red, desperately looking for a petrol station that's open, remember who is responsible and why.

Blame property speculators, blame the scumbags who ran Statoil and Shell, and blame the current government for this appalling Corrib deal which stole this country's natural resources wealth and gave it to Norwegians instead.

Living in denial - The property bubble

Living in denial seems to be one of the most common pastimes these days.

In fact, it's probably the third most common pastime in Ireland today, behind slumping in front of the telly to watch CSI: Miami and slurping wine with friends while comparing the notional values of their overseas property portfolios.

I thought it might be useful to run through a few known facts that people are living in denial of in Ireland today, just as a reminder and in the vain hope that some people might snap out of their torpor and face up to some of the scary realities that await us all.
Today, we'll kick off with a biggie - the Irish property market.

Irish property prices are about to collapse, because it is the biggest bubble in the global property market bubble. Yes, people have been predicting this for years, and with good reason. It is inevitable. No, it hasn't happened so far, but that just means the crash will be more severe when it occurs, which is very, very soon.

That one bed apartment you bought within a mere hour's commuting distance of Dublin city centre (if you leave for work at 4am) will not continue to inexorably rise from the half million euros you bought it for.

The reason for this is because it is simply not worth anything like that amount in real terms.

Let's look at the fundamentals of this market. Historically, the average family house anywhere was thought to be worth approximately three times the average industrial wage. In Ireland, accommodation now is a factor of around 12 times the average industrial wage.

Also, the US property market has just tanked, and Ireland's exposure to America makes us particularly vulnerable to economic developments there.

Finally, didn't you notice that the only people talking up house prices are those with vested interests in selling them? Auctioneers (recently demonstrated on Prime Time to be utter cowboys), Estate Agents (who increasingly and quietly have been selling their own houses and renting), and newspapers (whose lucrative property sections which shrilly trumpet new developments are dependent on the advertising from those same developers).

Get out now if you can. Banks have already divested themselves both of their own property (HQs and bank branches) and of their property debt. The clever speculators left the Irish market at least a year ago.

This is a pass-the-parcel game where the last one holding the overpriced package will see it explode messily, devastating their finances and personal security.

Indications from data gleaned from popular sales and letting website Daft.ie show that more and more places are on the market longer, being repeatedly listed at ever lower prices and that a full crash is imminent.

There has never been a soft-landing in a bubble market. There wasn't one with Dutch tulips or South Sea stocks, there isn't one in the US housing market now or the London and Tokyo bubbles from previous decades, and there won't be one in Ireland now.

The market will crash, perhaps by as much as 30% in one year. If you are still in doubt, cast an eye over the excellent web analysis conducted at Daftwatch, and the informed discussions on The Property Pin.

Prices in London took the best part of a decade to recover from their crash in the late Eighties. Prices in Tokyo took even longer to recover. Prices in Ireland are more inflated now than either of those markets ever were.

If you've just taken out a large mortgage, you could be trapped in the property you've just bought for a decade or more, in order to avoid negative equity.

If you have a string of properties, each leveraged off the back of notional equity increases in previous properties, you are extremely exposed and could even find yourself close to bankrupcy like this fella.

The party's over and normal rules of engagement are about to resume, people. Which is good in the long term for all those unable to purchase their own dwelling, but very bad news for those seeking to make money by sitting on their backsides.

How to avoid the Brits

... or, to put it another way, which holiday destinations have the lowest density of English soccer hooligans?

As Christmas hastens hard upon, it is at times like these that a man's thoughts, honed by the howling wind outside his door, turn to the holidays. The SUMMER holidays, that is. The time you get to soak up beers and sunrays as opposed to the time imminent when you soak up abuse from distant relatives.

According to some research by the BBC, there are a number of countries out there best ignored if you want to avoid Brits, and apparently only one of them is Britain. (Three if you're being picky.)

Scarily, one in ten Brits now live abroad, a figure approaching the European record set by Ireland where something like thirty out of every ten passport holders live abroad, due to the fact that it has become the designer second citizenship of choice for many Yanks and Brits.

Yup. If they're not taking out Irish passports, those pesky Brits are emigrating en masse to your and my favourite holiday destinations, intent on making a shite of them. Which raises some questions about the popularity of Tony Blair's regime back home, when you think about it.

Australia, Spain, America, Canada and Ireland might as well be British already (should that be again?) there are so many Brits living there. And poor old New Zealand, South Africa and France are next to be Britified. (Again, one thinks, not for the first time either.)

Most of South America and large chunks of the Gulf and East Africa are also showing disturbing signs of turning Brit, according to the Beeb, and even countries like Thailand, Libya and China are not safe from their baleful influence.

So where does this leave the poor Irish holidaymaker, desperate to avoid the tens of millions of Brits masquerading as Irish people?

I'd suggest Berlin, Budapest and the Cape Verde Islands for your summer break this year, people. Such is the rate of property purchase by Irish investors, that the likelihood is that by summer there won't be any indigenous people left in any of those places, and you'll have it all to yourself.

Well, you and the half a million Paddies who bought up the neighbourhood, that is.

So in short, Santa, I'd like downtown commercial property in the historical centre of Tallinn for Christmas because I've been very good.

And baby Jesus, can we swap the six million British people pretending to be Irish for the 1.5 million Irish people pretending to be British, and then we could have world peace, just like Miss World promised?

Screw it, we'll even take the septics too. In the name of world peace, like.

Floating up the Lagan in a bubble market

Just when you thought there was nothing about the Irish property market that could possibly make you raise an eyebrow, along come the kind folks of the University of Ulster with their quarterly house price index to tell you that wartorn backwater Northern Ireland is currently experiencing the kind of precipitous increases last seen when people in Dublin first started talking about tigers.

That's Ulster, you know, the economically bereft, paramilitary plagued zone of bitter religious strife. Where the majority of the GDP is produced by the government paying for state jobs.

Yup, the six counties have apparently managed to move beyond the stereotype by becoming a more expensive place than Wales, Scotland or even Northern England in which to buy a house.

Quoth the good professors, "The average house price now stands at £180,128 up by 32.1% on a year before and up by 11.9% over a quarter."

Rockefeller knew he was in the end of the bull market when his shoeshine boy was offering stock tips.

Surely a bubble market in Belfast is a sure sign that the Irish property bubble is set to pop at last?