The Billion Euro House

Money everywhere, and not a dime to his name:

DUBLIN — As an emblem of the modern Irish condition, Frank Buckley is almost too apt. Dead broke, he lives in a house made of money.

...Mr. Buckley, 50, calls the apartment — built from thousands of bricks of shredded, decommissioned cash (each brick contains, roughly, what used to be 50,000 euros) — the Billion Euro House. He reckons that about 1.4 billion euros actually went into it, but the joke, of course, is that it is worth simultaneously so much and so little.

...The house has lights — a company moved into the office upstairs and let Mr. Buckley tap in to its electric lines — and is surprisingly warm, despite having no heat. Money makes for good insulation, Mr. Buckley said.

He calls himself a hustler, and he seems to have a knack for personal reinvention. In the go-getting 1990s, he worked as a tour manager for musicians. Then he founded a charity — Sport Against Racism Europe — that received an 80,000 euro award from the government. The bottom fell out, the financing dried up and now he is on the dole, living on 188 euros a week — about $250 — in unemployment benefits.

...Living and sleeping amid all this money while having little himself has given Mr. Buckley plenty of time to ponder his, and Ireland’s, predicament.

“I’m one of many, many people,” he said. “I wouldn’t be on the same level as people in business, who owe millions. But the money I owe is the same as owing millions. If you don’t have it, you don’t have it.”