Westmeath senator Donie Cassidy says no one listened to him when two years ago he advised first time buyers to purchase a home.
It’s just over two years since the Castlepollard native and leader of Seanad Eireann declared on the floor of the Senate that “now is the right time to buy”.
House prices have been falling since the occasion in April 2008 when the senator challenged members of the house to join him 12-18 months later when he said they’d have risen by up to 30 per cent.
“Prices are now nearing the bottom end,” he said at the time but two years later many analysts feel that there’s a long way to go before the market bottoms out.
“I will remind the House, perhaps in 12 or 18 months, when prices have again increased by 25 per cent or 30 per cent, that they were told this by the Leader of the House on this historic day, the tenth anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement,” he said.
The senator pointed out that he was basing his prediction on his experience, but when contacted this week by the Advertiser, he says he was commenting in the light of an ESRI report which predicted growth of 4 per cent for the next seven years.
When asked if his own property experience should have given him a greater insight into the falling prices, he said his own business had been “pretty successful from very humble beginnings” and insisted that no one could have seen international events like the failure of Lehmann’s in the US.
On the first anniversary of his prediction, which has gained a cult following on property websites and has its own dedicated facebook page, prices had dropped by a national average of around 10 per cent and by the time the second anniversary rolled around, his own county town of Mullingar had made national headlines with buyers scooping up apartments for less than €100,000.
The comments have clearly come back to haunt him, despite his insistence that no one listens to what’s said in the Senate, and that no one followed his advice.
“No one was misled,” he said, commenting on the “poor coverage” which senate debates receive and how the incident would never have been reported but for an unnamed Fine Gael member seizing the moment.
“No one reports anything in the Senate,” he said, arguing that it’s time that reporters looked into the positive work done there.
