What will happen to all the ghost estates?

Ireland does ruins quite well, actually. It may, truth be told, be one of the things most readily associated with us internationally - along with rain, general greenery, mountains, Guinness, U2, leprechauns, and, um, the IRA. Even at the height of the boom I don't think the world really saw us, at least not for very long, as the thrusting go-ahead alpha economy of Europe if not the world we did.

We may be in the middle of the greatest exercise in ruin creation in Ireland's history, leaving the dissolution of the monasteries and the Big House burnings of the War of Independence in the shade. Ghostestates.com is a fascinating resource, and a rather incomplete one. All over the country, anywhere that someone imagined that someone else would commute from there to somewhere else, there is a little (or not so little) glade of shiny new houses, like little boxes made of ticky-tacky.

What should happen to these ghost estates? Some, with my worthy hat on, should become social housing, although with that nicely cavalier disregard for planning we also do so well some of them are less than blessed with amenities and infrastructure anyway. But with my more poetic hand (apologies for mixed metaphors - I could get even clumsier, but its late and its Friday and I have a sleepy baby to contend with, not to mention a sleepy me) perhaps we should created a National Bureau of Ruin Creation, with will "distress" these buildings in appropriately picturesque ways. Then let nature take its course, and in less time than it takes to name the Golden Circle we have a set of pretty, tourist-friendly ruins all over the country. We could even boost the construction industry a bit by building the interpretative centres now. "How did those people of this small island on the Western seaboard of Europe come to build these structures," the informative plaques might begin, "which had no apparent use or function. Scholars have advanced many theories, some simple, some more complex, yet all of which refer to their worship of the Bubble of Property, a creed whose beliefs were stated in the simple formula - Thy Price Will Always Go Up."

Alas, those Irishmen and Irishwomen of long ago were proved wrong, but we can still see the vigour of this strange creed, seemingly self-evidently absurd just a few years later.