While 2022 marks 100 years since the founding of the Irish Free State it is also the 15th anniversary of another Ireland, a sandy island 6,000 km away off the coast of Dubai bought by the Ennis based property developers Larionovo.
The five-acre plot dubbed ‘Ireland in the Sun’ was to be a part of the wider ‘World Islands’, a collection of 300 artificial islands made from dredged sand in the Persian Gulf representing various nations across the globe.
Conceived by the controversial Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum construction of the archipelago began in 2003 with the Ennis based company Larionovo buying the Irish island for a reported €28m in 2007 as part of a consortium with a number of Irish investors. The completion date for the entire project was set for 2012.
CEO of Larionovo Ray Norton, from Clare, explained to The Irish Independent at the time how the project would work, “Mainly this is an investment product, which people will buy and then lease back to hotels etc. The concept of how the World will work is that you will be able to have a pint in Ireland on Tuesday and then take a launch over to Thailand for a meal and then, maybe the next day, have a sauna in Turkey”.
The island was to have 190 units ranging in price from €780,000 to €2.2m with Georgian style apartments to the east and cottages to the west, as well as hotels, an Irish-themed pub, and even a recreation of the Giant’s Causeway. The island immediately got a lot of attention in Celtic Tiger Ireland with The Irish Times reporting that the new emerald isle was receiving an “unprecedented level of interest from potential Irish investors”.
By March 2007, 75% of the yet to be constructed properties on the island were sold but soon after the global financial crisis of 2007 and 2008 marked doom for the project. By the end of 2008 Larionovo was in liquidation, construction had ceased across all the islands, and Dubai World, the company behind the entire World Islands project, was left with €66 billion in debt.
The World Islands now sits as an eye sore in the middle of the Persian Gulf, Lebanon has been commercially developed, but the Ireland island is looking less like an emerald and more just like a sandy blot in the middle of the ocean, the same goes for almost all the other islands.
Beyond simple aesthetic factors however lies a more serious problem with the project, a paper from The University of Tehran said the construction of the islands resulted in “devastating environmental consequences” citing that the “dredging of sand that has led to confusion and turbidity of seawater as well as damaging marine habitats such as coral reefs”.
Daragh Sharkey who was once a business partner in the now defunct O’Dolan International with John O’Dolan, a key member of the consortium who purchased the island, spoke to The Clare Echo about the project, “We were ready to go with full planning for 200 units which included villas, hotels, The Giant’s Causeway etc” he said, “it was ready to go to ground if services were there. I mean we could have gone to ground straight away, there was a launch of the project. The lack of general services prevented ground from being broken and obviously the economic impact prevented that even further”.
Only €5m was ever paid by the Irish consortium, purchasing real estate in instalments like this was standard practice in Dubai and a major contributor to the ultimate unravelling of the ‘The World’ when the economic downturn hit Sharkey explained, “In the UAE it is very difficult to get a mortgage, the only way to get finance, and it wasn’t just this project it was every project, was stage payments. So, if a person was buying an apartment, they’d make stage payments as the project went on, so after certain milestones you’d make a payment, so you’d always be behind on the milestones. Obviously with the economic impact people couldn’t afford to make payments so every project stalled, it wasn’t just one of them”.
Nowadays Sharkey isn’t so enthusiastic on the concept of ‘The World’. “At the time in the bubble of everything else it was a great idea, it was something different, it was something new. Now, with the realisation of hindsight, I don’t think it would work well enough but, saying that, only recently there was big project announced in The Maldives, it’s going to be a floating city, which, you know, is taking account of climate change and water rising. So maybe I’m wrong in thinking it wouldn’t work now” he said.
Sharkey is right that some still believe in concepts like ‘The World’ as it seems the door may not be fully shut on the islands. The Kleindienst Group, the largest property developers in Dubai, have been making progress on developing the six island ‘Heart of Europe’ section of the archipelago with an estimated completion date of 2023. For Larionovo’s Ireland though, it seems a dream which will never happen.
