Becoming a Culchie…
Among all the other things going at the moment, most of them to do with Covid-19, I am in the process of trying to buy a house. I did toy with the idea of moving to Dublin but property prices there are ridiculously high and I wanted to avoid having to commute, so I decided to stay local, not that houses are very much cheaper here in Maynooth…
Another factor has been my arthritis. It’s not at all bad at the moment, but a while ago I was viewing a property which was very nice but had very steep and narrow stairs and I suddenly struck me that in a few years’ time they would probably be quite difficult to manage. Eventually I found a lovely bungalow near Maynooth and last week had my offer on it accepted. There’s a lot that can go wrong from here but all the paperwork, survey, valuation and other stuff is proceeding and I am hoping to move into the new house towards the end of the summer. Fingers crossed. I know that a lot can go wrong in the house-buying business so I’m taking nothing for granted.
There are many similarities in the house buying saga here in Ireland compared to the United Kingdom (where I have bought and sold several properties over the years), but one big difference is the auction process. Estate agents here in Ireland are generally called auctioneers, actually. In order to register to bid you have to first show that you have the necessary funds and then you can place a bid online. It’s easy in an auction to get drawn in so far that you end up spending more than you wanted to, so I decided on an absolutely upper limit on how high I would go. Fortunately the bidding stopped well below that.
There are a few other differences between the UK and Ireland. One is that if you buy a new house here you have to pay VAT on it, which is a considerable increase in cost. Another is that stamp duty is just 1% in Ireland, whereas for a property of similar price in England it would be 5%. Other than that the business of mortgages and valuations and surveys and Land Registry is all tediously familiar.
When I told a friend what I was buying and where he described my putative new house as a “Culchie Bungalow”.
I’d heard the word Culchie before but decided to look it up. The original meaning was a person from rural Ireland, but nowadays it refers more-or-less to anybody who lives outside Dublin. I was quite surprised however to see that Maynooth is specifically mentioned as a place where culchies live on the wikipedia page
Anyway, I don’t mind being called a culchie. I’ve been called a lot worse over the years!
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In the Dark 
June 23, 2020 at 2:58 pm
I suspect the word was indeed originally used to describe people coming into town from the village of Kiltemagh in Mayo. When you hear people in that area mention that village, it sounds exactly like ‘culchie’. In Dublin, the term rose to prominence in the 1970s and 80s, when Dubliners began to resent Kerry for dominating Gaelic football
June 23, 2020 at 3:40 pm
Get a cat!
June 23, 2020 at 4:47 pm
Sounds a bit similar to the Scottish system, where frequently the end-game is sealed bids sent to the selling solicitor, which are opened after the closing date. But we don’t get to see the other bids – whereas it sounds like you get to respond to them eBay-style (in which case the smart strategy is to keep your powder dry and bid in the last few seconds of the auction). That could certainly drive prices up – although so does our system, where the lack of information provokes you to bid more than needed to be certain of getting a place you really want. Here, though, the seller doesn’t have to take the highest bid – e.g. you might prefer to sell to a nice young family rather than a developer if the bids were close. But the most important feature of our system is that, once the bid is accepted, you are committed: you have to come up with the money. So there is none of the nonsense that you get in the English system of long chains breaking and the buyer pulling out at the last minute. If they can’t sell their place, that’s not your problem. I don’t know how the English can stand to continue with such a flawed system.
June 23, 2020 at 5:01 pm
You don’t get to know the identity of the other bidder(s) but you do get notified when another bid comes in.
I did wonder whether there might be phantom bidders employed by the estate agents to boost the price!
There were some very low bids when I entered the auction but all the bidders who made them dropped out as soon as a reasonable bid was made. You are only allowed to bid in increments of 5K, incidentally.
I agree about the English system, which is a nightmare. I am in a good position here though as I am not in a chain, and the vendors already have another property and they have already moved a lot of their stuff out…
June 23, 2020 at 7:36 pm
But do you get chains in the Irish system? They seem something you should work hard to avoid.
June 23, 2020 at 7:40 pm
I assume so. When a bid is accepted it is not binding until contracts are agreed. It’s only when the deposit is paid that it is binding. There could therefore be the same issue with chains as in England.