Irish spend billions in UK property spree

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Post-ceasefire investors buy up chunks of England and Scotland


It's the second Irish invasion of Britain. The descendants of the Irish workers who built the housing estates, the roads, the airports and the shopping centres of postwar Britain are taking over. In the last 18 months, billions of pounds have been spent by Irish investors, many of them from post-ceasefire Northern Ireland, buying up vast quantities of commercial and residential property in England and Scotland.According to Irish banks and leading property consultants on the island, Ireland's entrepreneurs have taken on and beaten foreign investors like the Saudis and the Germans in the acquisition war across the Irish Sea.

The properties that have fallen into Irish hands over the last year and a half include:Blackpool and Wolverhampton airports, bought for £15m.,Twenty shopping centres throughout England, Scotland and Wales, costing a total of £1.55bn.,The high-profile Wolseley restaurant, near the Ritz in central London, for which a private individual from Northern Ireland paid £11m.A new report by the property consultants BTWshiels has found that Northern Irish investors have become 'aggressive' in buying up properties across mainland Britain.It discovered that almost one fifth of all property investors in the UK are now Irish, compared with only three years ago when the figure was just 10 per cent. Keith Shiels, of BTWshiels, puts the surge in Northern Irish investment into Britain down to post-ceasefire prosperity.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1750059,00.html