Property deals backfire - Swathes of council-owned land lying idle
Councils across the country also took out significant loans to buy up land with a view to building social housing — only to see their plans unravel as the economic crisis wiped out any hope of these residential developments coming to fruition.
The full extent of how much land bought by councils during the Celtic Tiger and that remains idle today is unknown. What is known, however, is that, in 2010, a land audit found that local authorities had 259 sites covering 775 hectares with a loan value of €500m that might have been suitable for a scheme designed to bail out councils and take their debts off their books.
