Alto Vetro, grand canal docks, dublin

Italy never made the group; they declared a tax amnesty on foreign deposits and got €100bn into their collective over the table balance sheet and netted €5bn in taxes. Berlesconi may have his personal life episodes but he a very prudent economic manager.

Ireland it seems has left the group following some really hard budgets; one notes the very positive stance taken by the FT; it seems after being the model case according to many economists in the inflating the bubble phase; the country is now regarded as the model case in how to deal with the fallout.

@reddy wrote:

There’s been a fair bit of schadenfreude surrounding our plight across the water actually. We definitely don’t want to give them another photo op!

maybe we should just implode it

or turn it into an arts project of some kind

Is work still progressing? it’ll be nice to have the tallest building in Ireland title taken back for dublin, Cork and Belfast had ideas above their stations.

Yes, I had exams over in the RDS over the past few weeks and you get a good luck at Montevetro on the route over to it and every day I saw activity on-site. Cranes were moving and you could see workers on the top floors. NAMA or no NAMA, it should be completed and put on the market. It’d be great to see a company of the calibre of Google take it as their EMEA headquarters so that it doesn’t become our very own version of the “Empty State Building”.

@mud hut!, I meant to say aqua vetro, is that still going ahead? As far as I know it was planned to be 80 something. I think Cork’s Elysian is 81m also.

@cgcsb wrote:

@mud hut!, I meant to say aqua vetro, is that still going ahead? As far as I know it was planned to be 80 something. I think Cork’s Elysian is 81m also.

I think its on hold like everything else.Im not sure but i think it was only 24 stories so it would have still come up short compared with the Obel tower in Belfast.

@mud hut! wrote:

I think its on hold like everything else.Im not sure but i think it was only 24 stories so it would have still come up short compared with the Obel tower in Belfast.

Not true. Obel Tower is to be 85 metres tall with 28 stories. At 4 metres per storey, Aqua Vetro can beat it at 96 metres. Given that Montevetro will be 60 metres at 16 storeys that is a reasonable estimate of the possible height of Aqua Vetro.

Hopefully Aqua Vetro will be built so that finally, Dublin will be the home of the tallest building on the island. Given that it is the island’s primate city it is only right that that is the case.

@publicrealm wrote:

But surely primates thrive even better in the sub-tropical climate of Cork the real Capital:D?

g’wan away ya buck eejit-surely Armagh’s frost loving Red-Cap monkey lives in the e primeval city for building tall spires????

I have to say that this is great news. I’m glad that Google are sticking with us during these shitty times.

€99m for such a large building in a prominent location is an absolute bargain. Fair play to them.

Google is buying the ‘skyscraper’ from developer Real Estate Opportunities, which is trying to raise cash to redevelop the Battersea Power Station.

The bulk of the Google proceeds will go to Ireland’s ‘bad bank’ for toxic debt, which owns the loans that REO took out to develop the Montevetro site.