Everyday Life, Debt and Death in North Dublin

This thesis is about the cultural phenomenon of homeownership in Ireland; a country where, historically, home ownership has particular cultural, symbolic content. It is also about the collapse of Irish property dreams using the key example of Priory Hall in Donaghmeade, Dublin 13. On Friday, 14 October 2011 Dublin City Council asked the High Court to evacuate the 249 residents of Priory Hall as it was declared a fire hazard due to poor building standards. My research considers how a group of some eighty-five families bought their dream homes in the Priory Hall apartment complex during the Celtic Tiger, only to find themselves a few short years later dispossessed and homeless yet still paying mortgages. Priory Hall is now one of the key spaces of representation for the follies of the Celtic Tiger era and subsequent economic collapse; it is also a key site in which notions of ownership, rights, responsibility and respectability are being hammered out alongside new modes of governing and new ways of articulating the relationships between the state and its citizens