AJ Noonan is the chairman of the Small Firms Association.
AJ Noonan
The SFA's pre-budget submission is here. AJ queried my assertion that building land around Dublin was concentrated in a small number of hands. Business & Finance magazine reported in 2000 that the bulk of the development land in Dublin was owned by just eight speculators – Gerry Gannon, Michael Cotter, Mickey Whelan, Tom and Mick Bailey, Joe O’Reilly and Brian Wallace, David Daly, Joe Moran and Liam Carroll.
I also mentioned that Ireland is the only exception to the Europe-wide trend that land prices broadly match population density. This graph shows the pattern clearly. Apart from Sweden and Finland which have huge unpopulated Arctic regions, Ireland has the lowest population density in the EU 15.
European Land Prices