Last week, an imposing ship dropped anchor in Dublin Bay.
This was not your typical luxury liner where you can find, interspersed among the middling rich who cruise regularly, pensioners and ordinary working people. Of course, they would have saved for years to be able to afford a mere week, or maybe even two, sailing around the Caribbean islands.
Aboard “The World”, as this ship is called, things are different. Here you actually buy your own home, ranging from more modest apartments costing just under a million euro to opulent penthouses which come in at around €6 million. All have balconies giving stunning views over whichever ocean the ship might be plying.
Some of the owners live onboard permanently. However, ordinary proletarians who might have a sudden stroke of luck turning them into instant multi millionaires needn’t think they can aspire to a spot in this particular paradise. “We wouldn’t necessarily want to have someone who just won the lottery”, multi millionaire businessman and penthouse owner, Mike Clare, told a Sunday Tribune journalist, explaining how the current owners vote on who might be accepted as suitable purchasers of available apartments.
Images from the “The World’s” website give a glimpse of the opulence onboard. However, the purchase price is only the beginning of the outlay. The new owners must pay their share of the running costs of keeping them in the luxury to which they aspire. This involves paying the 250 ship workers who cater to their undoubtedly expensive tastes. One can imagine how the onerous, and controversial, annual management company fees on apartment owners in Ireland might barely cover one week of the year on this ship.
Lotery winners disappointed by being rejected as penthouse purchasers on “The World” may wish to console themselves with another option to grab a little luxury onboard if only for a short time. They can rent available vacant properties and cruise for a few weeks. Some of the most elegant penthouses will be available as the ship passes Tierra del Fuego and reaches the Antarctic around Christmas. One can be had from December 25 to January 2 for a total of €85,000 for the ten days!
“The World’s” cruise among the penguins will probably be uneventful. Should it get enmeshed in pack ice however, it looks unlikely that our hard pressed mortgage payers in negative equity will be volunteering to dig it out. They will continue to be too heavily committed to do anything but trying to earn enough to continue to meet their punishing monthly payments on their one bedroom apartments or modest three bed semis. They might sincerely wish however that a few property developers and their banker friends were on board.
Strange how the super rich seem to have a fascination for all things yachting, whether living in one or building them to sell for profit. Several business media report that the aforementioned Mr Clare, who made his fortune from his Dreams bed manufacturing business, recently joined Scotland’s richest capitalist, Brian Souter, in purchasing major luxury yacht manufacturing company, Sunseeker International.
Mr Souter made his fortune from the deregulation and privatisation mania of Margaret Thatcher in Britain which enabled him to set up the Stagecoach bus operation. In the 1980s and early 90s, cut throat competition between his company and other private operators saw the amazing spectacle of rival buses racing each other to be first to grab passengers waiting at the designated bus stops. After the lives of both passengers and bus drivers were put at risk, the police in Manchester were forced to move in and bring the operators to heel!
Large scale privatisation and deregulation in Russia was also a huge boost to the luxury yacht building industry. The fall of Stalinism was a signal for many of those who were well placed to grab public property for little or nothing and within years become billionaire oligarchs. Others, like Andrey Malenkovich, made their billions by moving quickly into new niches such as private banking and currency speculation which the restoration of capitalism allowed.
No paltry €6 million penthouse aboard “The World” for the likes of Andrey however. His personal yacht named simply, A, is conservatively estimated to have cost €300 million. Many less billioned fellow oligarchs can only look on with envy from their own craft which only cost from €200 million down.
So when “The World” sailed into Dublin Bay last week it couldn’t be seen as simply another visiting ship. It is aptly named because it is a metaphor for the skewed world in which we live, a symbol of the gaping chasm between the obscene wealth of a tiny minority on the one hand and on the other, the hard pressed victims of the system that creates this gulf.
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