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During the Celtic Tiger boom Ireland experienced a phenomenal growth in property construction and house prices.  Construction became a major component and driver of the Irish economy.  Both development and its underlying finances were allowed to become massively over-extended, facilitated by weak financial regulation, a laissez-faire planning system, and a politically clientelist culture.  Rather than the much hoped for ‘soft landing’, the property bubble popped in spectacular fashion.  In this paper, we examine the reasons for the boom and bust in Ireland, arguing that Ireland’s enthusiastic adoption of neoliberal forms of governance, and its particular brand of neoliberalism which blended elements of American neoliberalism (minimal state, privatisation of public services, public-private partnerships, developer/speculator led planning, low corporate and individual taxation, light to no regulation, clientelism) with aspects of European social welfarism (developmental state, social partnership, welfare safety net, high indirect tax, EU directives and obligations), created an economic model that was always vulnerable given it was predicated on constant growth.  The global financial crisis not only exposed the deep flaws in the model, but sent the economy into a rapidly downwards spiral.  Somewhat disconcertingly, the Irish government’s solution to the crisis is a new round of neoliberal reforms through severe austerity measures, bank bailouts and the creation of the National Assets Management Agency, which seek to re-establish the same economic model that has already proven to be so vulnerable.  We illustrate our argument by detailing the new spatially uneven geography of property in Ireland, the creation of a new phenomena, ‘ghost estates’, and the government’s reaction.