Abandoned Ireland

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I have no sympathy for the landlords. They brought it on themselves. Good enough for them,” says Connor Ryan, standing in the half-built house, looking over to his own home across the green. The author is interested above all, one senses, in the grain of day-to-day life: in the stories and power retained by detritus and everyday objects – the crucifix on the wall, the dusty piano, assorted books, the bottle of cod liver oil – even amid the desolation of abandonment. And more than anything, Brownlie’s tremendously evocative photographs tell and amplify such stories of materiality, and of buildings poised trembling between life and death.’– Neil Hegarty, The Irish Times Whatever you write about one would be the same about them all,” says Tuam-based developer Kieran Farrell. “It was all about tax incentives rather than the market requirements. Everything in that area was all built around tax incentives.” A reminder of what not to do An effective property tax which will act as a financial disincentive for property owners to leave properties vacant.

Clonmines was a small town that began to expand rapidly following the arrival of the Normans. It soon developed a river port, church, monastery and castles, with its main road leading straight to Wexford town.

Heathfield House, Ballinruane, Co. Limerick

After a few days and tireless research, I found the owner. Turns out he was a property developer and had plans to turn the home into luxury apartments. We met and he agreed to let us investigate: not only that, he also gave me a set of keys to come and go as we pleased. I was ecstatic. Rob Kitchin, a researcher at Maynooth University who has written extensively about ghost estates, says there are so many unfinished estates in rural Ireland due to the Government’s “minimal policy, minimal finance approach”. More resources are required to promote vocational trades and apprenticeships if we are to create a sufficiently large pool of skilled people capable of turning around voids in a sympathetic way. Across the road from the estate, Joan Walsh’s local shop that she has run for 35 years enjoyed a boom in business when the 40 construction workers at The Beeches dropped into her for sandwiches every lunchtime. The work ended abruptly and the workers left. Since then, like on other ghost estates, Walsh has had a problem with rats.

The department’s March report showed that the number of unfinished developments had fallen to 420 from 2,846 in 2010, a reduction of 85 per cent in six years. Of the remaining estates, 129 developments, or 31 per cent, are empty with no residents. Some 291 developments are home to residents. Ryan has no idea if the unfinished houses are owned by the estate’s original developer, Brendan Carney, whose Co Sligo-based company BMC Developments built them, or by ACC Bank, the late-to-the-party Dutch-owned lender that financed this and other housing estates in rural Ireland, or the banks that loaned money to buy-to-let investors to make money renting them out. The workhouses and prisons in Ireland at that time were suffering from overcrowding, which forced them to offload some of their more troublesome inmates to asylums, which meant that many of the patients did not actually need psychiatric care and were there for living purposes only, but it was against the law to refuse entry to anyone. It was given the name Asylum X due to its cross-shaped layout. This nineteenth-century manor was home to Thomas Lefroy (Lord Chief Justice of Ireland and reported muse for Pride and Prejudice’s Mr Darcy) . Despite the fairy-tale feel of the limestone exterior, turrets, oriel windows and gables, the interior is plagued with so much water damage, vegetation growth, and vandalism that it – alongside the estate’s other abandoned buildings – looks like a forgotten ghost-town.That whole scheme that allowed those ghost estates to happen was initiated with no evidence, only lobbying

The Grand Hotel in Tramore, Co. Waterford. There is a direct correlation between economic activity and dereliction. Picture: Dan Linehan With death at its centre, it is clear why this former city mortuary in Belfast sits high on our list of abandoned places in Ireland that will creep you out. However, visiting is not advised for your own safety due to the deteriorating state and would also be considered trespassing as this is private property.

Greenawn Gowra, Tipper Road, Naas, Co. Kildare

All we want to do is get the job done and to get the ones half-done down. I am told that the council has the money for it but I don’t know what the hold-up is,” he said. Rebecca Brownlie provides a rapid sketch of the house’s 20th-century history: its beginnings as a property built, rebuilt and rebuilt again by a fussy Scottish industrialist; its final iteration as a complicated Edwardian mansion; and its salad days as a focus of what passed for high society in a narrow, unionist-controlled Northern Ireland (Princess Margaret, who seems to feature in every story of the 20th century, inevitably pops up here too).