Conceived and funded in the late days of the "Celtic Tiger" economic frenzy, the project reached completion in September of 2008. The national economy was in collapse.

According to the website promoting the property, the Elysian's tower "stands like a beacon above the city." And that's true.

But the 17-story residential "landmark" "is not just a monumental building [they write] — it is designed with people in mind." They also say that the apartments "have one thing in common [—] space." That's true, too. There's plenty of space. That's because they designed it with rich people in mind.

Between the times of groundbreaking and completion of the project on Eglinton Street, the frenzy of lunatic borrowing and building stopped, across the country. Buying stopped. There were too many buildings. There weren't enough rich people.

Nearly every town and village across the country has a "ghost estate," a section of houses that are in various grades of incompletion — from a scaffolded four walls of concrete blocks on one end of an empty street to the finished house on the other end with stickers on the never-cleaned windows. There's nobody to buy the completed houses, so no speculation that the unfinished ones are worth finishing. There's no more money to come from the banks, which have collapsed. There's nobody who can restore the blighted fields to their earlier grassy state.

The Elysian, of course, in (southside) downtown [city centre] Cork , did not wipe out grasslands that can now never be replaced. The Vikings did that (or the Anglo-Normans at the latest) — and it was a swamp. The Elysian replaced a postal sorting office.

The structure was built by the large Corkonian property and construction firm O'Flynn Group and funded by Allied Irish Bank.

At the time of the establishment of the controversial National Asset Management Agency that nationalized unmanageable bank loans in late 2009, O'Flynn Construction was one of the top ten most-indebted property developers in the country. The €150 million cost of building the Elysian was less than one one-hundredth of the debt that Michael O'Flynn and his company had incurred.

The workings of the taxpayer-funded bailout of the banks and how that affects the likes of the O'Flynn group is a matter for the experts. They're busy now, trying to explain why they didn't know the Irish economy was headed into a dead spin. and the bottom fell off when they tried to apply the brakes.

The promotional page for the Elysian at the O'Flynn Group's website, linked from Wikipedia, is gone now.

There are rumo(u)rs that the management company offered to relocate those who bought residential units because they wanted to save the cost of keeping the building open. One source tells that the building is 20% occupied. Seen through the triangle protrusion on the south side, it seems like the real figure is less than that; although, to be fair, that segment of the floor-plan likely comprises the most expensive units.

There is some suggestion that most of the few people who do live in the Elysian are renters. Daft.ie lists units there "to let," (rent) "from €1,295 Weekly."

As of early 2011, the Elysian stands lonely, an invitation to poetic descriptions of its metaphorical significance. The locals call it "the idle tower," a reference to the nearby pub "Idle Hour."