Are the rich running out of money? Due to their complex financial arrangements, Overheard can’t tell, but an interesting case study has emerged in the fate of a desirable south Dublin property.There is a lot going for 30 Palmerston Road in Rathmines as an offering. It has the exact mix of period Victorian features and mod cons required by the super-prime buyer. Unlike Denis O’Brien’s Raglan Road house mentioned in a past Overheard, it has a kitchen, for example. It also has a genuine drawingroom which, in the photographs taken to advertise it, features a chandelier.It’s in the heart of Dublin 6, walking distance from the various things people in Dublin 6 like to be walking distance from, such as Gonzaga College, a decent fishmonger and Ranelagh in general. But it’s not on the main drag from anywhere to anywhere else, meaning it retains a dignified grandeur lost to some of the 19th century mammoths of Drumcondra, for example.It was once the home of taoiseach Garret FitzGerald, under whose stewardship the likes of Bono and John Hume visited it. It’s possible they sat in the stately diningroom around a table that looks as though it could easily be home to a cabinet budgetary subcommittee.The late Garret FitzGerald, whose former home in Rathmines had an asking price of €3.75 million. Photograph: Eric Luke The house was listed for sale at €3.75 million and its owners would have had high hopes: the seller was the son of the taoiseach. Mark FitzGerald is best known as the co-founder of Sherry FitzGerald, Ireland’s largest estate agent. Surely someone would pay the asking price, given the house’s many positive attributes, with the full selling power of the eponymous organisation at their back?Not so. According to the Property Price Register, it sold for €3.35 million, more than 10 per cent below asking and the kind of bid that sometimes provokes a derisive snort when offered for a more modest house in the current market. In the first three months of the year, 84 per cent of houses sold in Dublin went at or above asking price. The moneyed moguls at the top of the market apparently lack the firepower required of first-time buyers.Minority reportFully transported: US supreme court justice Elena Kagan. Photograph: Olivier Douliery/AFP/Getty Summer in Ireland remains a powerful draw for Americans of note, for whom our heatwaves and political scandals seem like small beer. The latest to trod the old sod is US supreme court justice Elena Kagan.“I’m going to Ireland to play some golf and I’m going to Ireland to do some other things,” the Obama appointee to the world’s most influential court said last week, capturing the full range of activities available. She was addressing legal professionals during a fireside chat-type conversation on stage at the Ninth Circuit Judicial Conference in Bellevue, Washington. “We’re going to ‘Ireland-Ireland’ and we’re also going to Northern Ireland,” she added.Displaying the pro-homework values you might expect from a senior judge, she has been studying up. First on the list was Land, Maggie O’Farrell’s latest novel, about a surveyor in post-Famine Ireland. “It’s totally transporting and the prose is gorgeous, and I loved it,” she said.She has also been watching Blue Lights, the BBC’s Police Service of Northern Ireland procedural – or “cop show” as Kagan puts it. “It gives you a sense of some of the difficulties that that community has faced,” she said, not specifying which community. “So I thought it was a really great show.”Kagan is one of the US supreme court’s downtrodden liberals, in the dissenting minority on recent landmark decisions including Trump vs United States (upholding presidential immunity from prosecution). We assume she won’t be playing Doonbeg. Shut up and driveOverheard supports all Irish competitors from football to Frisbee, so our attention was drawn to a campaign by the nation’s international Rocket League team, which is trying to fundraise for travel costs and – vitally – green jerseys to wear at a forthcoming tournament in Paris.What in the name of God is Rocket League? A good question, and one which we passed on to Sam Keogh, the team’s coach. “Essentially it’s football, soccer, except with cars instead of people,” he says. “The cars are rocket-powered, so you can fly and do all these different, quite difficult mechanical tricks.” It’s a video game, we should probably stress at this point.The Team Ireland line-up including coach Sam Keogh, or LTXSam Ireland apparently has a very robust Rocket League scene, with a slate of in-person events and a handful of players at pro level. Do we as a nation send it long and put them under pressure like Jackie’s Army? No, we’re quite balanced, says Keogh, though “every country has their own style of play”. [ Struggling to get your children off Fortnite? There’s a reason for thatOpens in new window ]The Paris event will be vital prep for the Nations Cup, a global country-versus-country competition, for which ambitions are very high. “The level of the Irish guys is a level that can beat any team in the world on the right day, under the right circumstances,” says KeoghPerhaps surprisingly, Taoiseach Micheál Martin is a fan. He opened the National Esports Centre in Cork last year, a vital hub for competitive gamers, and more recently issued a video expressing his support for the team and his selfless hope that a good performance would “put Cork firmly on the map” as a gaming mecca.The fundraiser’s target is a mere €1,000, or 0.005 per cent of the annual funding received by the greyhound-racing industry. It sounds like a decent bet on success. Putting out firesOwen Keegan has moved out of his chairmanship of Residential Tenancies Board. Photograph: Alan Betson Two public jobs are advertised this week that are not for the faint of heart. The first is the chair of the Residential Tenancies Board, patrolling the DMZ between the landlords and tenants of Ireland, between whom no love is lost.Opt for that one and you’d be replacing Owen Keegan, who before his 2024 appointment was already well known in the capital as the often controversial chief executive of Dublin City Council. He took the RTB job a few years after facing ferocious backlash for sarcastically suggesting student unions should develop their own housing, which did not go down well. Keegan lasted two years of a five-year term before declaring he had “done my bit”. If you think you can do better, there’s around €16,000 a year in fees in it for you.If that’s not tempting, there’s always the position of senior assistant chief fire officer for the county council in Tipperary, parts of which been on fire for much of the summer.