Latest news with #Rathfarnham
Irish Times
2 days ago
- Politics
- Irish Times
Relaxing the planning rules
Sir, – Planning rules are devised for safety and structural integrity and for ensuring a minimum quality of life for inhabitants. I am appalled at the suggested relaxation of rules for attics, extensions, garden cabins and division of houses. The description 'race to the bottom' is the first that comes to mind, as, of course, renters will be the primary victims of these proposed changes. Unscrupulous landlords all over the country must be licking their chops. Are we about to lose all sense of decency, justice and empathy for renters with this half-baked attempt to solve the housing crisis? – Yours, etc, MARGARET FARRELL, READ MORE Rathfarnham, Dublin.
Irish Times
27-05-2025
- Business
- Irish Times
Will equity release prevent you getting approved for Fair Deal?
If I choose to release equity in my home, what might happen to State contributions under Fair Deal if my nieces and nephews have to wheel me off to a high-security care home? I'm now 74 and might over-indulge if my bank account gets healthily inflated by one of these loans. I thought I heard something over the last few years about the HSE being unhelpful about care home contributions if the main asset has been diminished by a loan? Ms GB It's a good point. Equity release may be an attractive proposition for some people, as may Fair Deal, but there is a risk as they are both feeding from the same pond – in this case, the equity in your home. READ MORE Fair Deal, which regular readers will be familiar with, is a system that subsidises the cost of long-term nursing home for residents, according to their means. There are three elements – a portion of your income; a portion of your savings or assets; and, finally, a portion of the value of your home. This last one is the only thing we are concerned with here. If you are the sole occupier of the home, you are liable to pay 7.5 per cent of its value for the first three years of your residence in a nursing home, after which there is no further charge against your home. If you are a couple, the charge is halved to 3.75 per cent per year for the three years. If your spouse or partner needs to go into care, they pay the balance. Let's assume for the purposes of this piece that you live in Rathfarnham, in South Dublin County Council, where the median house price is €426,000. On that basis, your 7.5 per cent contribution would come to €31,950 a year – or close to €96,000 over the three years. As with any mortgage, the bank will fix a charge against your home to ensure it gets its money back. Most people availing of Fair Deal do not have that sort of cash available to them. So what they do is this: they apply for a Nursing Home Loan. This covers the contribution due on the family home with the money being paid from the sale of the property down the line, or after their death. Naturally, the HSE wants to be sure of getting its cash back if it is advancing you that sort of money. And the way it does this is by taking a charge on your home. When the house is sold, the transaction cannot be completed until anyone with a charge on the property has that charge satisfied, so Revenue – which will be collecting on the loan on behalf of the HSE – is confident that it can recover the money lent to the nursing home resident. The issue here, of course, is that any money you tap through equity release is also going to be subject to a charge against the property. How big that charge will be depends, of course, on what form of equity release you choose and the amount that you borrow. As we noted recently in an On The Money newsletter, there are now several different models for equity release. Several of these follow the traditional repayment model. The advantage here to the homeowner is that you are availing of a mortgage interest rate that will be lower than any rate you would get on borrowings by way of a personal loan. But, as with any mortgage, the bank will fix a charge against your home to ensure it gets its money back. If you borrow, say, €100,000 against that home which is valued at €426,000 in Dublin, there should be no issue, as there is plenty of equity for all comers. Repayment mortgages, of course, make sense only for people who can make the regular repayments – or have someone make those payments for them. When you're retired – and at 74, most of us would hope to be! – you're unlikely to have that repayment capacity. It can be very difficult to get Fair Deal if you have an equity release mortgage on your home, especially a lifeloan-type product That's where something like Spry Finance/Seniors Money's lifeloan comes in. Its big attraction is that you do not need to make any repayments during your lifetime. The downside of this is that the interest bill keeps mounting in the background, which means the amount due can be a multiple of what you originally took out in the loan, if you survive long enough. If you borrow €100,000 through a lifeloan, the amount repayable 10 years later will be close to double that, thanks to the joys of compound interest, and not far short of three times the amount borrowed in 15 years - which is why you need to think very carefully before going down this route. As a result, unsurprisingly, Spry Finance insists that there are no mortgages outstanding on any home it lends against. If there are, you will have to consolidate that amount in any loan you have taken, which could make for very expensive borrowings. Its promise to you is that the outstanding loan balance will never amount to more than the value of your home. But that is little consolation to the HSE and Revenue, which need to make sure that 22.5 per cent of the equity is available to them to repay any loan under Fair Deal. This is why it can be very difficult to get Fair Deal if you have an equity release mortgage on your home, especially a lifeloan-type product. If you are the sole occupier of the home, you are liable to pay 7.5 per cent of its value for the first three years of your residence in a nursing home However, Spry does now offer a feature where you can pay 6.8 per cent interest on your loan instead of the standard 6.7 per cent, and ringfence 20 per cent of the value of the property from exposure to the lifeloan. That gets you most of the way to the 22.5 per cent required under Fair Deal. However, you would still need to reassure the HSE and Revenue that you, or some guarantor, was good for the remaining 2.5 per cent of the property's value – €10,725 in our example – before they would consider extending Fair Deal to you. And, of course, in the absence of Fair Deal, you will be stuck with private nursing home charges of between €5,000 and €8,000 a month depending on location. So is it possible to get Fair Deal with equity release? Yes, but it is very difficult– and the HSE's initial position will almost inevitably be to refuse, unless you can show it where the money will come from to repay any Fair Deal loan. Please send your queries to Dominic Coyle, Q&A, The Irish Times, 24-28 Tara Street Dublin 2, or by email to with a contact phone number. This column is a reader service and is not intended to replace professional advice
Irish Times
17-05-2025
- General
- Irish Times
Irish hares are unique but the law of the land is against them
The floorboards in the house hadn't been touched for more than 50 years, so when we finally lifted some at the start of this year it wasn't surprising to uncover a collection of random items tucked between the creaky old joists. Among them were cardboard milk cartons from Hughes Bros Ltd in Rathfarnham, set up by three brothers who established Ireland's first pasteurisation plant in 1924. One discovery stood out above the rest: an old cupronickel threepence coin, or '3d', featuring an Irish hare – the design work of the English artist Percy Metcalfe, who was commissioned to create the first coinage for the Irish Free State , which began circulating in the winter of 1928. The hare was part of a broader set of coins, divided into two themes: the pig, hen, bull and ram, symbolising farm life and produce; and the wolfhound, woodcock, hare, salmon and horse, reflecting the world of hunting. Roughly the size of a coat button, Metcalfe's Irish hare appears in profile, facing left and alert, as if poised to leap into motion. Its head is lifted, ears laid back flat along the curve of its arched back, while its muscular and powerful legs are drawn in close beneath the body, braced and ready to jump. By pure chance, just a few days after we had cleared out the room, Joe Duffy was on RTÉ's Liveline talking with his callers about their interactions with the Irish hare. Sheila phoned to share her story about a tiny hare that her dog brought into the house years earlier. She fed it warm, sugared milk from a baby's bottle, which it gulped down. The hare, she told Duffy, was 'absolutely fabulous' – tame as anything with her family, but wild, wary and skittish with anyone else. READ MORE The Irish hare has long been tied to fairies and the spirit world. Another Joe, from Cork, told listeners a story from 50 years back. He was driving late one wet November night when a hare began running in front of his car, matching his speed at 45 miles an hour before vanishing into a field. He knew it was bad luck to harm a hare, but later his father told him he shouldn't have followed it – hares, his father said, were from another world. Another caller, Patsy, chimed in with his memories of a priest he knew who travelled by pony and cart. If the priest ever spotted a hare on the road, he would stop, get out, and walk around the cart three times, just to keep bad luck at bay. Technically, it's a type of mountain hare, but it carries distinct genes that set it apart The Irish hare and humans go back a long way. It's been here since before the last ice age, evolving in isolation for thousands of years. Unlike the European rabbit and the brown hare, which arrived only in the past few hundred years, the Irish hare is unique and found nowhere else in the world. Technically, it's a type of mountain hare, but it carries distinct genes that set it apart, shaping its size and the colour of its coat. Unlike the mountain hare, the Irish hare doesn't turn white in winter. We're not the only ones to connect with these mystical creatures. Raising Hare, English author Chloe Dalton's bestselling debut, tells how she found a newborn hare one February morning during the Covid years, and how the bond she formed with the little female transformed her life. Hares are the only game species in England and Wales that can be shot year-round – a grim fact, given that their population has plummeted by more than 80 per cent in the past century. Last month Dalton launched a petition urging the UK government to introduce a legally binding closed season for hares, protecting them from January to September. Despite its unique status, the Irish hare is poorly studied. And while its population is believed to be stable, it faces real threats from habitat loss and a warming climate. It doesn't enjoy full protection under Irish law either. Between September and February, the Irish hare can legally be shot or hunted with packs of beagles and harriers. Ireland, Spain and Portugal are the last remaining countries in Europe where hares can be legally chased by dogs, either in open hunts or in so-called 'closed' coursing fields, where hares are first captured and then released for the chase. Each year, some 6,000 wild hares are taken under licence. They're given a 75 metre head start in the coursing field before two muzzled greyhounds are set loose; the winner is the first dog to force the hare to turn. After spending about two months in captivity, the hares are then released. A few years ago, in research funded by the National Parks & Wildlife Service, researchers from Queen's University Belfast set out to track the fate of hares released after coursing . They fitted 40 hares with GPS-radio collars and monitored them over six months. Half of the hares had been previously captured and coursed. The results showed no significant difference between the coursed and uncoursed hares: they didn't experience higher mortality rates, nor did their movements differ meaningfully. [ Anti-blood sport campaigners criticise finding that hares do not experience greater risk of death after coursing Opens in new window ] This research is unlikely to sway those determined to see hare coursing banned. In 2019, the same year Irish politicians in the Dáil declared a national biodiversity crisis, a Red C poll, commissioned by the Irish Council Against Blood Sports , found 77 per cent of Irish people supported ending live hare coursing. Wicklow TD Jennifer Whitmore introduced the Protection of Hares Bill, which has garnered cross-party backing. The Bill is short and to the point: it seeks to ban the practice, stating that 'it shall not be lawful to engage in live hare coursing' under the Wildlife Act. The Irish hare's ability to rely on its speed and agility to escape predators is why it's used in hare coursing. As awareness grows and the debate surrounding coursing intensifies, it remains to be seen whether future generations will choose to protect this unique species or allow the practice to persist.
Irish Times
07-05-2025
- Business
- Irish Times
Clarendon Properties seeking €11.8m for south Dublin retail investment
Paddy McKillen and Tony Leonard's Clarendon Properties has instructed agent Cushman & Wakefield to find a buyer for Nutgrove Retail Centre in south Dublin. The sale looks set to provide Clarendon with a healthy return on its investment. Having paid a total of €12.8 million in 2015 to acquire both the Nutgrove Retail Centre and the mixed-use Beacon South Quarter in Sandyford in 2015, Clarendon is offering the Rathfarnham scheme to the market at a guide price of €11.8 million. Nutgrove Retail Centre is immediately adjacent to both Nutgrove Shopping Centre, which is anchored by Tesco and Dunnes, and Nutgrove Retail Park, which is anchored by Aldi and Harvey Norman. The centre extends to 4,056sq m (43,659sq ft) of retail warehouse accommodation along with 200 surface customer car-parking spaces. The scheme comprises four interconnected retail warehouse units and is anchored by Home Store & More. Other occupiers include Dealz, Pet World and Pat McDonnell Paints. Each unit comprises open-plan retail warehouse accommodation and ranges in size from 388sq m (4,179sq ft) to 2,672sq m (28,766sq ft). The total current rent achievable is €842,934 inclusive of top-ups and the weighted average unexpired lease term (WAULT) is 6.2 years to break options and 10.1 years to expiry. The park is 100 per cent occupied. The guide price of €11.8 million guide price (exclusive of VAT) reflects a net initial yield of 6.5 per cent assuming standard purchaser's costs of 9.96 per cent. READ MORE Cushman & Wakefield say: 'Nutgrove Retail Centre presents a rare opportunity to acquire a retail park in one of Dublin's most established and affluent catchment areas. Anchored by a long-standing lease to one of Ireland's leading homeware operators, the scheme benefits from full occupancy, strong footfall, and a high-quality tenant mix. The investment also offers compelling asset-management and regearing potential, underpinned by its strategic location within a densely populated residential area.'
