Waking up to smell the downturn, AIB last week changed its forecast for house prices to wind up falling 2% on the year in total, though they still insist it is a "soft landing" - notwithstanding our revelation last week of an OECD working paper that, having studied 49 boom-bust house price cycles in more than a score of countries, there had "never been a soft landing" if the decline is mild and gradual.

GREEN CORPS ONE stock that managed to buck the trend was Greencore, on the strength of massive trading volumes and speculation that property developer Liam Carroll (below) was quietly increasing his stake in the company to near the 30% threshold, at which point Carroll would have to make a bid for the entire company. Carroll purchased a 21% stake from Dermot Desmond last summer at Euro170m and rumours mounted that a takeover bid was imminent.

The company has proposed Euro1.1bn developments for its former Irish Sugar sites at Carlow and Mallow, but the sites would need to be rezoned from industrial to mixed use. The success or failure of the rezoning process will determine whether the sites are worth closer to the IFA market value estimate of Euro187m or the company's book value, an accounting concept, of Euro10m.

Would the company's current management team up with Carroll, spin-off the property assets and run an MBO for the food business? Some arrangement like it seems inevitable. At the company's AGM in February, chairman Ned Sullivan was asked about a potential split. His response, as sources reminded us this week, was that over time, the company aspired to at least internally separate the management and resourcing of the property business versus the food business.

It means that no matter how this Thursday's High Court judgement challenging the decision to award Greencore just Euro90m of the Euro145m in EU aid to exit the sugar business, the market will be taking a keen interest in the company's future.

RIP IRELAND OFFLINE ALMOST since the beginning of this decade, the lobby group Ireland Offline has been a consistent voice for better internet access for Irish people, meaning that despite its short life it has outlasted most of the ownership structures of Eircom. While owners there changed, the pressure group was a consistent, clear voice making the case for better internet access for Irish people - understanding intuitively that such access was an essential ingredient of our economic future.

Fortunately the force behind the group hasn't gone away you know. You can read him here each week or on his blog, www. mulley. net.

FREE THE DOWNLOAD 23 THE Irish Recorded Music Association won its court case to force Eircom, UPC, Irish Broadband, BT and other ISPs to reveal the identity of 23 suspected downloaders of 180,000 tracks of dubious legality.

Personally we thought once EMI and Apple had cut the first deal to sell music without copy-protection software, this sort of heavy-handed nonsense would cease. Then again, even Steve Jobs might want to know the identity of the person who downloaded 37,000 tracks - the average iPod owner buys just 22 tracks over iTunes at present.