WITH THE building frenzy of the last decade and a half, who would have thought that we would be thinking of knocking some of it down again? But Brendan McDonagh, chief executive of Nama, probably got it right when he talked about the need to demolish some of the surplus stock in out-of-the-way locations.

Everyone now knows that some of these estates will never be lived in, because they are not within easy commuting distance of jobs, or because there simply was never a market for them in the first place. It wasn’t just the bankers and the developers who got it wrong. The planners in the various local authorities have also made grave errors in allowing many of these estates to be developed in one horse towns and obscure villages.

These developments – many of them large executive-style homes – simply did not make sense, even in buoyant times. Some of them are now an eyesore, and could disappear even faster than it took to build them.

The same should apply to swathes of seaside developments in places like Lahinch, Achill, Bettystown and Courtown, where many of the owners can’t afford the luxury of a second home and can’t sell them on either. So much for the tax breaks that applied to these schemes in the early part of the boom. Now that they have run out for the most part, the mortgages still have to be paid monthly. Another daft idea of the era.

Don’t expect to see the wrecker’s ball out just yet. Like everything else in Nama, it takes months to formulate a policy and it is likely to be at least Christmas before the the demo men appear.