Sir, - As a regular reader of your residential property section, I would like to congratulate the auctioneers, and Sherry FitzGerald in particular, on the unfailing blue skies which appear over the properties they advertise. In the property section of June 17th, I counted 15 houses for sale, all with azure blue skies into the middle distance, most unlike the average cloudy Dublin day. Even more amazingly, 11 of the properties advertised by Sherry FitzGerald had exactly the same formation of clouds above them, despite being scattered all around Dublin.
I note in the same issue of The Irish Times a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority that the wrong photograph of a garden was misleadingly attached to an advertisement of a house for sale. Does this principle also apply to the attachment of the wrong sky to a house?
The property business has propounded a new honesty in written descriptions of properties by auctioneers, which is intended to give a true representation of a property, and avoid the embellishments of the past. Does this new honesty extend to photographs?
Perhaps a property company should take over the running of the Meteorological Service. It could undertake a systematic photographic survey of Irish properties, which would guarantee blue skies over all our homes for many years to come. Irish people could then talk solely about property prices, as the other major topic - weather - would be lost. - Yours, etc.,
Andrew Green, Marlborough Road, Dublin 7.