If Ireland’s rise was one of the most spectacular in Europe, its fall was one of the most precipitous, with a boom in the 1990s leading to a housing bubble in the 2000s that burst spectacularly when the banks fueling it threatened to collapse. In 2008, the government made an emergency decision to guarantee the banks’ debts, thus condemning the country to brutal austerity that has left it impoverished and weighed down by debt of its own.

Priory Hall is only the worst example. More than 2,000 developments begun during that period have turned into “ghost estates,” unfinished or vacant housing projects with 10 or more units that were meant to create communities but are now quietly rotting. Others, built under a system that allowed developers to “self-certify” — meaning that they could unilaterally declare, with only minimal government oversight, that their properties complied with building codes — are now falling apart, even while residents live there.

But Priory Hall stands apart because of the outrageousness of its inhabitants’ plight. Temporarily staying in housing provided by the Dublin City Council, its residents are still required to keep up mortgage payments on their deteriorating apartments. Meanwhile, the council, which was ordered by a court to take responsibility for the tenants and has already spent more than $2 million housing them, has gone back to court to avoid paying any more.

A spokesman for the council said he could not comment on a pending court case.

Meanwhile, Priory Hall’s developer, Tom McFeely, a former Irish Republican Army hunger striker from Northern Ireland who became a real estate mogul, recently had his $12 million house in Dublin seized after he defaulted on his mortgage. He has been declared bankrupt (against his will), given suspended sentences, fined and repeatedly ordered by a judge to make repairs to Priory Hall, to little avail.

Mr. McFeely has referred to his tenants as “begrudges” and “jumped-up Hitlers.” They do not like him much, either: in a confrontation outside court one day this spring, one resident snarled that Mr. McFeely could not even “build a snowman.”