By Paul Henley
BBC News, Republic of Ireland
David McWilliams is the man who coined the phrase "ghost estate" when he wrote about the first signs of a disastrous over-build in the Irish Republic back in 2006.
Now, it is a concept the whole country is depressingly familiar with. Most Irish people have one on their doorstep - an ugly reminder, says the economist and broadcaster, of wounded national pride.
"Emotionally, we have all taken a battering," he says. "Like every infectious virus, the housing boom got into our pores. You could feel it.
"You'd go to the pub and people would be talking about what house they'd bought. And now a lot of people, myself included, think 'God, we were conned'."
'Emotional thing'
Mr McWilliams paints Irish history as one of "economic failure".
"So to have risen so quickly and seemingly in the right direction and then to have that pulled away from us," he says, "it's more of an emotional thing than a financial thing."
There are 621 ghost estates across the Irish Republic now, a legacy of those hopeful years. One in five Irish homes is unoccupied.
If the country immediately used them to house every person on the social housing list, there would still be hundreds of thousands left over.
The obvious question of who people imagined would live in all these new-builds makes Irish people wince now.
But hindsight is a wonderful thing. Only a few years ago, developers feeding money into local government coffers were getting free rein to build row upon row of five-bedroom detached houses on the green outskirts of towns nobody had even thought of commuting from before.
(...)
BBC News - Ghost estates testify to Irish boom and bust
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8653949.stm
