We are the best little country in the world!

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/irel...ry-in-the-world-new-survey-suggests-1.1843347

Heard some mention of this on the radio yesterday, great news!!

Put that in your Swiss pipe and smoke it Jim2007

In all seriousness though, the funniest bit is that we come out number 1 for prosperity & equality - I presume that's because we are shouldering the tens of billions of euro in obligations necessary to keep ze germans and french banks stable...?!

Sure tis all relative....the end of the world must obviously be nigh if we're #1

So where are we on the corruption index? Or the gombeen index?

With property prices rising at 22% pa in the Capital, you betcha we're the best country in the world! Where else could a rebound of this magnitude from the 'biggest property price crash...ever'TM take place except in Ireland.

Way to go Michael Noonan et al!

The Irish media just love re-printing this guff. And, presumably, large swathes of the population love hearing it.

And we can't be having another property boom. What about all those policies put in place to make sure it could never happen again?

all jokes aside but we can hardly aspire to a level of pricing that makes it uneconomic to build (i.e. the price of the material and a normal builders profit being less that the ultimate sales price).

How we stop it going OTT is the tricky bit, the 2 main variables being land prices and builders greed. Either we regulate the hell out of it or we let the market have at it - this being Ireland we tip around the edges of both. The banks being in their sorry state will, to my mind, stop if going wild (if you cant get the crazy mortgage you cant buy the crazy priced house and the cash buyers will eventually get used up & the market returns to normal).

Often thought limited recourse mortgages would keep manners on the bank - i.e. jingle mail scenario. OK harder to get going, lower LTV, higher deposit, but significantly less chance of negative equity arising in the first place and less of an issue if it did (jingle mail).