Financial speculation and capitalist accumulation leave spatial and temporal traces. When the waves of the global financial collapse reached Ireland and culminated in the extreme measure of the comprehensive state guarantee, the receding excesses of the Celtic Tiger revealed a landscape that was gentrified and alienating. The spectrality of the ghost estates of Ireland became a synecdochal signifier of Ireland's ignominious fall from the podium of neoliberal grace and the focus of both popular lament and critical intervention. This essay provides a deferred assessment of the uncanniness of dwelling in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland by concentrating on the socioecological fallout of ruins and the longterm casualties of land speculation: that is, transformations of landscape into real estate, and of place into property. Reading Ireland's ghost estates as 'imperial formations' that 'register the ongoing quality of processes of decimation, displacement, and reclamation' - to use Ann Laura Stoler's term - the essay brings to the fore questions of dwelling and homeliness that suggest more protracted imperial processes which 'saturate the subsoil of people's lives and persist, sometimes subjacently, over a longer duree'. To demonstrate these arguments the essay will analyse works by Kevin Barry, Sara Baume, and Claire Keegan.
