Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 22 July 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. Sean Mulryan:

We were very negative in Ireland for a long period of ... from 2002 to 2007 because we felt that land prices were getting very expensive. We knew in the UK that there's 60 million people and they had ... equally the population in the UK was growing at the same rate per head of capita as the Irish and whereas the UK was 250,000 houses a year and they were getting about 180 ... Ireland with 4.5 million people, producing 90,000 houses a year, you didn't need to have too much ... you didn't need really to get into a lot of details to know there was something wrong. So, we started to do our own research and we did it every year, more hands on. We all ... how we knew that there was 30,000 houses being built in 2006 that wasn't necessary, just from our own research. So, we were ... we saw oversupply very early and that's why we didn't really engage seriously. 80% of our business at that time, in our land acquisition, was London. We done a certain amount in Ireland over that period just to keep our team going. We had a very good team for 20 years and we always wanted to have a certain activity in Ireland to keep our people employed, so we bought some land, but not a lot, to keep it ticking over. But we were negative very early on-----

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