An insiderÕs look at the Irish property ÔduckshootÕ

Date Published: {J}

Interesting that I happened to be reading a review copy of Simon Kelly’s book Breakfast With Anglo on a day when the ongoing disaster of the property crash hit home palpably once more – this time in the shape of the chains and locks being put on McNamara building sites in Galway.

A number of the sites at NUI Galway were locked-up on Friday morning and there were ashen-faced people walking about with mobile phones to their ears, cranes standing idle against a leaden skyline, and an air of utter confusion that has been so common in recent times.

That’s one of the drawbacks of Kelly’s book. For me, it conveys none of the tragedy . . . it’s an entertaining, cracking read that rips along, and, at times, the whole ‘developer thing’ in some respects comes across as laddish, adventurous and so charmingly ‘Irish’.

Don’t get me wrong, Kelly makes it clear that they are prepared to meet the consequences, but there is such an air of devil-may-care running through the entire developer-banks system, that you begin to pinch yourself . . . remembering what bastards the banks can be when it comes to something like a delayed payment on a credit card.

There’s plenty of colour in the book. For instance, when his developer father, Paddy Kelly, meets a valuation expert in a field in Dublin, they both hop into Paddy Kelly’s new Rolls Royce and bounce around in the field as they discuss finance.

For me it’s one of the key scenes because surely it was repeated umpteen times around the country. Perhaps they bumped around in 4X4s on the outskirts of those towns in the West where there are now ghost estates of houses planted amongst ‘green fields, ,like some sort of alien crop.

The book purports to give the ‘other side’ of the story of how the development boom built up in Ireland in the good years and how it all came down with such a crash in the past few. In other words, we have heard from newspapers and those who blame the developers, this is the story written by one of the developers.

Simon Kelly, in fact, comes across as some sort of ordinary bloke involved in an extraordinary business. Kelly doesn’t duck the responsibility, but he makes it sound it was all just a little unfortunate . . . rather than a national disaster. A series of deals gone wrong.

Kelly distinctly underplays himself and sounds like a man who always drove a battered jeep, but there are insights into the swashbuckling style in which these guys operated . . . with more than willing accomplices on the other side.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.