A question - what is it in the Irish tax code (or the broader set of incentives faced by property owners in Ireland) that makes it more lucrative to leave so many proprieties derelict rather than to develop them for retail or, even better, housing?

I was fortunate enough to work with Denis at the ESRI in 1982-84 for my first job out of UCD. Nice to see his memory being honored like this.

"every penny spent on regulatory compliance is a penny not spent on lawsuits"?

Have you talked to a Cowboys fan any time in the past quarter century?....:-)

My 1.5 seconds of fame around minute 7 in the graphics www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zQ0...

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

-FS Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, published 4/10/1925.

Through Waterford-born Nobel prize-winning Physicist Ernest Walton (1903-95), Ireland has a better claim than the United States to having been the first (along with New Zealander Ernest Rutherford and Englishman John Cockroft), to have "split the atom". www.atomicarchive.com/history/manh...

As for New Year's resolutions, Samuel Beckett had it right: "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."

Or W. B. Yeats in The Second Coming:
"The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."