NAMA holds pubs where Celtic Tiger was born

SOME of the property spoils in the legal battle that threatened to derail the entire NAMA project proved to be the very watering holes where such business was usually discussed.

The pubs lie in the shadow of the Dublin Law Library and had been marked for development until the property bubble burst. Now they are under taxpayers’ control.

The well-known pubs are The Legal Eagle and the Chancery Inn and have appeared on the latest list of properties subject to enforcement actions published by NAMA.

The buildings belonged to the developer Paddy Kelly, who fought a high-stakes legal challenge to stop NAMA taking charge of his €1.5 billion empire.

Now the pubs are included in a tranche of 40 properties that NAMA revealed were the subject of enforcement orders in July. These supplemented a much longer list of initial assets published earlier in the summer.

Twenty-three of the recently confirmed properties were in Dublin, seven in Cork, two in Britain and the remainder scattered across Ireland.

The Cork sites included once-lucrative sites in Glanmire, Carrignavar, Carrigtwohill and Little Island.

The latest list of properties NAMA has acted on includes key assets in the portfolios of tycoons Mr Kelly and Sean Dunne.

Mr Dunne’s assets include units at his prized Mountbrook complex in Dublin. Mr Kelly’s assets include property and a number of pubs inside and outside Dublin.

The Chancery Inn was itself a case study of the property bubble.

In 1998, it sold for £905,000. A year later it changed hands for £1.3m.

When it was put on the market again as part of a development package in 2006, the asking price for the entire lot was €3.5m.