An overall rent of €100,000 a year is sought for the ground and first floors of “the best pitch in Douglas.”

Twenty years after it hit national headlines, set political and business shock waves and repercussions that saw Ministerial resignations, tribunals and indirectly the demise of a serving Taoiseach, Cork City’s Horgan’s Quay site is back up for grab, openly this time, by tender.

An Cearta is set by the Lee Valley, near Inniscarra, seven miles from the city fringes, says Tommy Barker.

A NEW restaurant, Palmento, is opening in Cork City’s Douglas this weekend, as one of Kinsale’s best-known restaurants, Crackpots, is for sale as a 2015 trading opportunity. Crackpots is offered as a going concern for €700,000.

An office investment yielding €42,500 a year in rent is up for sale for €420,000.

An un-named Chinese investor has stitched up a deal on Fitzgerald House, an 11,600 sq ft property facing Cork city’s English Market and adjacent to the dramatically just-painted up Singers Corner, where - coincidentally - a commissioned mural by artist Johnny Bugler depicts a floral Chinese pattern, as seen on old Singer sewing machines.

A former SuperValu shop, along with other shop units giving a total of 19 retail and office units, is now for sale — for an average of just €26,000 per unit.

THE demand for quality investments continues, with €33m in an office portfolio sale to three separate buyers in Dublin, and with a private buyer paying over €1.5m for a Cork City retail buy, as a pension investment, with a Tesco Express as its main tenant.

Irish people could be facing yet another additional charge on their insurance policies in the future.

A RECENTLY let, double-tenanted building on Cork’s suburban Douglas Road, by St Finbarr’s Hospital, is up for sale as an investment, for €1.5m.

A NEW sales and letting pitch is to be tried at Cork’s City Square development — the pitch is ‘space for free.’

IN one of the larger industrial deals in several years in Cork, a harbour site with 233,000 sq ft of buildings has been bought for close to €3m, by a waste recycling company.

EAGLE-EYED investors will swoop on a portfolio sale of nine apartments in Cork’s Jacobs Island — in a block called the Falcon.

HE’S really pleasant, but wouldn’t be an intellectual heavyweight like Garret.

The word legend is indeed appropriate when recalling the life and career of journalist and broadcaster, Arthur Quinlan, who died in Limerick at the weekend aged 92.

WHAT do Taoiseach Enda Kenny and General David Petraeus have in common?

Few people truly witnessed Enda Kenny’s “patient, steely determination” until he fought off the heave against his leadership of Fine Gael in 2010, RTÉ broadcaster Sean O’Rourke has said.

Tommy Barker is taken by Coosheen’s site and garden

A SERIES of value-driven public auction and private treaty clearances are coming out of the traps with selling agents Downing Commercial and they include five houses, in varying stages of construction on three acres with FPP for 15 dwellings, guiding €70,000.

VIRTUALLY the entire Mariners Hall apartment complex in Cork city’s Skehard Road/Mahon area is for sale as a single unit.

MORE musical chairs in train along Cork city’s South Mall, where ground floor showroom/offices come up to let at a competitive €18 per square foot — just a shade under the €15 psf quoted for larger overhead first and second floor space.

IT was a busy week for cruisers at the RCYC, with a good turnout for race four of the O’Leary Insurances League.

That Brian Lenihan worked through his illness was no surprise to those who knew him, writes John Downing

Garret FitzGerald will be remembered best for his massive contribution to public life in Ireland over the past 50 years, writes John Downing

Ill Fares The Land

ALMOST there — just needing a push, a further small pot of money, and gardens - that’s San Rosa.

ONE of the biggest commercial sales in Cork city this year has been scooped by developer Michael O’Flynn.

Journalist John Downing is to become the Green Party's deputy government press secretary, the party announced today.

AUCTIONS were the damp squib of the Dublin property market in the latter half of 2006 as that market cooled, and outside of Dublin, sales by public auction can be hit and miss even at the best of times.

UNLESS planning restrictions on masts are eased, people in parts of Kerry will not get mobile phone coverage, a leading phone company warned yesterday.

CHARLES HAUGHEY’S infamous appraisal of his protégé’s abilities has served as both an asset and a liability to Bertie Ahern and now provides the title of a new book on the Taoiseach.

THE mid-summer interlude in West Cork over for another year, racing is back to full swing along the coast and this weekend will be particularly hectic in Cork Harbour, with the Royal Cork holding its annual two-day At Home Regatta.

By John Downing

Political Editor, John Downing reports on the role the backbenchers are being asked to play before going to polls

John Downing, Political Editor

Political Editor John Downing finds Justice Minister Michael McDowell upbeat about progress being made against the compensation culture

I wish to refer to John Downing’s front page article on Senator John Minihan’s comments on dual mandate for Councillors and TDs (The Irish Examiner, August 5).

Political Editor John Downing finds inflation is hitting the roads programme

Explosions sparked by a fire in a New York hardware store toppled the building’s roof and brick facade, burying dozens of firefighters beneath the rubble.