There are two kinds of ghost village in Ireland. Each is the legacy of over-reliance on an exotic and apparently endless resource. In the 1800s, Francis Drake’s potato rapidly became the staple crop of the Irish peasant. Nutritious, bountiful and resilient, it could support families on tiny parcels of land, and new settlements extended far up into previously inhospitable hills. Then the blight came and wiped the potato out. Arcane land laws and a remote foreign government conspired to reduce the people to starvation. Emigration provided the sole safety valve. Today, the deserted villages of the great famine still stand, often in places so barren it is impossible to believe a community once thrived there. In the 2000s, the European monetary union gifted unfeasibly low interest rates to the Irish economy, and credit rapidly became its staple resource. A people with a cultural predilection for home ownership set about building everywhere. Fields in remote areas became luxury estates. Fields beside motorways became apartment complexes with balconies over the traffic. In the country, people built second homes beside their own. In the cities, people built houses in their gardens and side passages. And then the crash came, wiping the banks out. Lousy planning laws and a governmental elite grown complacent over a decade in power conspired to reduce the economy to near bankruptcy. Unemployment soared and emigration returned. Ireland has over 600 ghost estates—unfinished or unsold developments of “luxury” homes, remote from commerce and transport, abandoned by broke developers. There are perhaps 250,000 empty houses, in a country with only 2m in total. Social agencies talk of using them as housing for the poor and homeless. But in reality, short of digging them up and relocating them to places where families actually want to live, many of them will never be used. There are ghosts elsewhere, too. Among the tax incentives driving the construction bubble was one for hotels. The result is a blight of “zombie hotels.” So what’s to be done? A group of architectural practices, presumably with time on their hands, recently collaborated to come up with uses for idle real estate. FKL Architects took the brief more literally than most. Its proposal suggested converting unfinished estates into “Cities Of The Dead… the unfinished houses reused as crematoria and chapels, and the remains housed in semi-detached tombs.” Meanwhile, the architectural bones of the boom are being put to other creative purposes. David McWilliams’s play Outsiders, an exploration of the Irish financial crisis, is on at the Abbey, the national theatre. The set is a replica of the unfinished office intended to be the new headquarters for Anglo Irish Bank, poster child of the boom and the bust, and now owned by the state. Scandals in Ireland tend to gift the lexicon with new acronyms. An obscure crisis in the 1980s—which involved a double-murderer being arrested in the house of the Irish attorney general—acquired the moniker Gubu, when the then taoiseach, Charles Haughey, described the series of events as “grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented.” (Gubu has become the Irish equivalent of the suffix “gate.”) The acronym that encapsulates this crisis is more prosaic: Nama is the National Asset Management Agency, the state vehicle that now owns all the zombie hotels and, so far, €15.3bn of debt bought from Irish banks. But the architectural legacy of the boom is not confined to dereliction. Dublin’s cityscape has been transformed in the past decade by a combination of civic initiatives (a tram network and a “free” bike rental scheme) and public monuments. Some of these symbolise yesterday’s values: the shiny, stainless steel Spire on O’Connell Street, erected in 2003, is a perfect emblem of the empty promise of new wealth. A new theatre designed by “starchitect” Daniel Libeskind for Dublin’s docklands opened earlier this year, just as the Docklands Authority became a synonym for failures of corporate governance. But other monuments suggest more authentic riches. The spiritual home of Irish sport, Croke Park, is now one of Europe’s foremost stadiums. Another fine stadium has risen across the city, on the grounds of the world’s oldest international rugby venue, Lansdowne Road. Irish architects Scott Tallon Walker and US firm Populous have audaciously landed what looks like a massive transparent flying saucer in the middle of one of Dublin’s wealthiest suburbs. Linking the sites are two graceful bridges by Santiago Calatrava, dedicated to James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, which have transformed the city’s neglected quays. Joyce and Beckett, of course, were emigrants. And as the bills loom, those who aren’t stuck in negative equity, or in solitary confinement on ghost estates, are increasingly looking to follow them: the year ending April 2009 saw net emigration for the first time in 14 years. Perhaps in generations to come, the children of this new diaspora will return to walk among the ruins of these remote, deserted 21st-century villages, and wonder how anybody, ever, could have wanted to live there.
