There are nights when Emma Rogers finds it difficult to sleep. Sometimes, she hears voices in the street outside. Other times, a car slowly moves up her road, loiters and then drives back down again. Then, there are the occasions when unoccupied, neighbouring houses get broken into and some of their fittings -- radiators, mostly -- are stolen.

Emma and her fiance Anthony Byrne own a three-bedroom house in Millfield Manor, Newbridge, Co Kildare. They have lived there since April 2010, but the property that cost them €270,000 still does not feel like home.

Millfield Manor -- a street of 15 houses, with only three occupied -- is, by most reasonable definitions, a ghost estate.

There are no street lights, so once darkness falls the pathway is only accessible by torchlight. The road surface has not been completed properly and already weeds are poking through. Many of the common areas are untended and the back gardens of the empty houses have become a jungle of wild grass and briars. Rubbish has collected in most of the doorways and a thick film of dust coats the windows.

An unsightly dump lies just 30 metres from Emma and Anthony's front door. At first, it was a site where the builders of the development deposited their waste. Then, it became a place where unscrupulous people in the vicinity dropped their unwanted rubbish. All manner of household tat is here. Just days ago, someone drove up to the estate late at night and deposited a mattress onto the road.

Millfield Manor is part of the much larger Millfield development which lies adjacent to Newbridge Tesco. The rest of the development has been completed, but Emma Rogers often feels that her half-finished street has been forgotten about.

"I wish we hadn't bought this place," she says. "I wish we'd stayed in Dublin. We live on a street where almost all the houses are empty and we only have two sets of neighbours.

"It spooks me out at night, particularly when I'm alone here. It gets pitch black outside -- and feels we're living in the middle of nowhere even though we'd imagined we had bought a house in a safe, popular estate."

Cars of litter bugs aren't the only nuisance to bother the six people who call Millfield Manor home. Rats have become all too frequent visitors to the area too, according to Emma.

"The house itself is lovely," Anthony Byrne says. "But it's really miserable to live in an estate that hasn't been completed properly. Barrack Homes (the builders) have gone bust and the county council doesn't seem to be interested. Something as simple as putting street lights up would make the street much safer and more inviting for new people. But who'd want to live here as it is?

"Myself and Emma are getting married in September and we're hoping to start a family next year, but it's not the kind of environment you'd want to bring up children in."

It's a view echoed by his neighbour, Diarmuid O'Connor. The 66-year-old Dubliner and his wife, Eileen, bought a house in Millfield Manor for €300,000 just prior to Christmas 2009 and have been left infuriated by the lack of progress on their street. "The only politician who's shown any interest is the local Sinn Féin councillor," he says. "It's easy to feel like you're forgotten about here."

The plight of the residents of Millfield Manor is echoed in housing developments and apartment complexes throughout Ireland -- the ghost estates of the nation.

According to the most recent survey by the Department of the Environment, there are 1,822 "unfinished housing developments" that are "inactive" and some 244 developments cited as "active".

But even those developments that fall into the "active" category may appear little different from inactive ones. According to a footnote in the department's report "Whether or not a site is active or not is a relative phrase, because a site could be recorded as active even though the level of activity could be very low and the numbers of workers engaged on the site could be very small."

According to Martin Heydon, Fine Gael TD for Kildare, his county has its fair share of ghost estates with 51 developments exempt from the new €100 household tax because they are in an incomplete state.

"I'm sure residents in these developments would rather pay the charge than live somewhere that hasn't been completed to their satisfaction," he says, and insists that he is aware of the difficulties in Millfield Manor.

"Ghost estates and such like are a legacy of the Celtic Tiger and the reckless planning decisions that were made. Many of the developers have gone bust and it is a considerable challenge to find the money to put things right."

Anthony Haughey is a photographer who has documented Ireland's alarming number of ghost estates for his acclaimed Settlement project. His images -- deliberately devoid of people -- capture the broken, run-down nature of the half-completed developments that pockmark the countryside.

"Often these places were put up in parts of the country that were miles from shops and pubs," he says. "They were built with little consideration for the facilities that people would need and I remember one estate -- I think it was in Leitrim -- where I saw people walking back to their house one night. There were no street lights and they had to pick their way home by torchlight, being careful not to trip on the uneven roads or the detritus left behind by the builders.

"The sad thing is that many of the people who bought properties in these estates had this idea that they'd find a rural idyll, but instead they live in a limbo-land that's half-urban, half-rural and with very little evidence of nature around them. And that's the thing that really struck me as I went from estate to estate -- you'd never see any evidence of wildlife whatsoever."

Cian O'Callaghan, from Maynooth University's geography department, has studied the ghost-estate phenomenon. "I think the conversation has to move on from the fact that they are remnants of the latter stages of the boom years and on to more pertinent questions about how they can be salvaged for those people who are currently living in them.

"Something as simple as street lights, or blocking up laneways where anti-social behaviour may take place, would make a big difference to their quality of life. At the moment, there can be a significant disconnect from the hopes and aspirations people had when they bought the property to the situation they find themselves at present.

"Furthermore, those in negative equity -- and let's face it, that encompasses a lot of people right now -- might feel they are trapped there, that they simply can't afford to sell."

Despite this, the financial burden will be lessened somewhat with this week's Finance Bill which, if passed, will grant more substantial mortgage interest relief to first-time buyers.

For now, Emma Rogers and Anthony Byrne can only wait and hope something will be done to improve Millfield Manor and attract new residents.

Both work in Dublin, and there are times when driving home in the winter darkness they wonder if fresh rubbish has been dumped in their vicinity or if their property has been burgled. "I know a lot of other people are in the same situation as us," Anthony says, "but that doesn't bring us any comfort at all. Something has to be done, but we're not holding our breaths."

Originally published in