Housing Crisis: Rosie (movie review)

Through a focused plot and character portrayals, Roddy Doyle’s newest movie highlights the flashpoints and pitfalls of Ireland’s housing crisis.

Dear Eoghan,
How’s it going? I’m writing to take a break from the usual political screeds and bring you to the movies. Well, almost. The movie we’ll be discussing today is Roddy Doyle’s latest, Rosie. It’s a movie which, although imperfect, has a flawless plotline which navigates any viewer through the heartbreak and distress of the housing crisis. Last week we scrutinised the average Dublin couple. With this movie, we are compelled to look at the fringes.

Sadly, the majority of my cinema-going the past few years has consisted of superhero movies with copious amounts of popcorn. I can count on one hand the amount of Marvel movies I haven’t seen on the big screen. Throw in a smattering of sci-fi and horror movies and you’ve got the perfect route to escapism. Of what else does the magic of the silver screen consist, if not a chance to get rid of reality and soak up some ridiculous fun? Bag of Malteasers optional.

Sometimes, however, M persuades me to see something more high-brow, and for this I am sincerely grateful. In these situations, I’ll forego the popcorn and escapism to get my teeth into something with more artifice, or social commentary. Even with M away (hustling in China this time), I didn’t need to be persuaded to see Rosie. It was a movie which I expected to inform me, but not to move me to such empathy and self-doubt.

This is a movie you can’t escape. Rather than being set in a Manhattan skyscraper or a faraway galaxy constructed of CGI, this is a kitchen-sink Dublin movie, replete with the bell of the LUAS and the damp clouds hanging over housing estates. It covers, almost exclusively, a single day in the life of a family of six who are stuck between the cracks of Dublin’s housing crisis. Rosie and her husband are perennially in search of a home – or at the very least, a hotel room to spend the night in – while also dealing with the everyday issues of family life, which are made infinitely worse by the strained living situation. The image of Rosie, phone wedged between her ear and shoulder as she straps her infant daughter into the back seat of the car outside her kids’ school, trying to secure a hotel room for a couple of nights, is a telling one.

If the movie was designed to point out the flashpoints and pitfalls of the housing crisis, then it did so to great effect through scenes like this – and especially through its dialogue.

 

At one point, Rosie (played to perfection by Sarah Greene) is talking to her partner after getting off the phone to “the emergency number”. Nothing is available tonight, although the emergency staff might be able to help her if she’s a rough sleeper. “We’re not rough,” Rosie says as she reports the conversation back to her husband. “There’s nothing rough about us.”
And she’s right. The true genius of this movie is to show a family who are stoic, hard-working and loving. Rosie and partner John-Paul (Moe Dunford) lead a family who are neither foul-mouthed nor dysfunctional. The very worst behaviour parents and kids display is to have a food fight in their car.
Admittedly, this is family is fictional, but it undoubtedly represents many of the thousands of families who have found themselves in this terrible trap. Families like this bump the free-market capitalist belief most of us hold: that the homeless and disadvantaged somehow deserve their lot in life. They’re slackers, they’re uncouth, or they’ve had too many kids. Well, no – they’re not all like that. Most have been slammed to the bottom of the ladder by incomprehensible market forces which even you, the responsible minister, cannot get a grip on.

Which leads to another telling scene in the movie. After the family revisit the home they once lived in, we find Rosie trying to pry her kids away from the front porch fittings and the trampoline out the back garden. This is the only home these kids have known, but obviously they can’t stay here. Try explaining that to them, though.
“Mr. Gaffney sold the house,” Rosie says pathetically to her young daughter, hanging for dear life to the front porch. “Do you remember Mr. Gaffney, the landlord?”
“But WHY can’t we stay here?” the girl asks.
She answers with a parental non sequitur: “We just can’t.”
What more can you say to a five-year-old child? Sit them down and lecture her on free market forces? Rosie doesn’t have time for that – and anyway she doesn’t understand the situation herself.

The movie also puts into stark relief the thin film of circumstance that lies between these families and absolute depravity. There are some moments when it seems the family will slip right through this veneer at any moment. All it takes for that car to break down, or her kids to be reported to social security, and you just know that’s it. If Rosie isn’t seconds away from completely losing it because of one missed hotel room, then the audience is; it’s a miracle that she and John Paul don’t resort to screaming at the kids or each other when they can’t find a home for their family, such is the desperation that is tenable in their every phone call and conversation.
Rosie’s thirteen-year-old daughter represents this tenuous grip superbly. She is a studious and quiet girl, yet she’s already starting to rebel against her family’s poverty; she would do almost anything to avoid another night in a hotel room – or worse, the family car. In her, it’s easy to see thousands of young women who fall into prostitution and addiction just to escape the poverty their parents can’t lift them out of. 

“We’ll find somewhere,” says John-Paul as their options for the night are running out.
Rosie looks up at him and asks plaintively: “But where?”

John-Paul has been ducking out of his minimum-wage job today to look for a home – any home – that they can move into. He visits a house on the East Wall, and is soon politely pushing past couples with trendy glasses and neat haircuts.
At some point in this movie, any thoughtful viewer will see themselves, and they will see the difference between themselves and a person who is truly living on the edge. For me it was this moment. I am one of those yuppies crowding the house. I can’t see the man passing me on the staircase as he sizes the place up as a home for his family. I am just obsessed with my own sorry position in this mess. I am contemplating the bathroom tiles. I am standing beside the well-groomed estate agent as she condescends to the eager father, asking if this really is the kind of place for a family?

After the movie I passed a homeless man on the Rathmines Road. I gave him a couple of quid because – well, but for the grace of God I would be there myself. I couldn’t talk to him. I wanted to but I was full of shame. I was magnanimously handing over a couple of grubby coins and I was disgusted with myself as a human being. How could I hold a conversation about the weather with a man who just happened to be born in a slightly less lucky position than me, and had been led by circumstance to the squalor and dirt of a life lived on the street, while I was led to a path of relative comfort? I got on the bus back to my upmarket one-bedroom flat.

But for the grace of God, Eoghan. Some stint of my birth and yours means we only have to watch this kind of desolation on a cinema screen or pass it on the street – or, once more removed, see it subsumed and condensed in a report from the Department of Social Welfare.

How far removed are you, Eoghan? Can you count the ways, the degrees to which you are disconnected from those who you represent? Discount the photo ops with newly-homed families and the mandatory meetings with your constituents; now calculate the number of struggling citizens you have spent time with and understood. Weigh them up against your colleagues,your UCD alumni and your neighbours on Ailesbury Road. The balance, I’m sure, is lacking.

More of which next week. For now, take the night off, stroll down to your local multiplex and watch Rosie. Soul-searching optional.

All the best, minister,
Simon

Main image via YouTube

Ireland votes: Article 40, blasphemy and free speech

Taking a break from the letter to the housing minister to take a sober, philosophical look at an important upcoming vote in Ireland. 

Ireland is now days away from voting to make another historic change to its constitution. Yet much of the talk about polling day revolves around who is going to win the presidential race – a race which, by all accounts, consists of one horse. Very little discussion is being given over to the newest proposed amendment to the constitution, to remove blasphemy as a criminal offense from the statute book. Compared to the national dialogue surrounding the 8th amendment – and even the chatter over the next planned referendum – the silence in the run-up to this referendum is positively deafening. Before the polls open, the country would do well to analyse what exactly it is voting on.

This silence is even more perplexing when set next to the uproar which erupted almost ten years ago with the Defamation Act. By criminalising anti-religious views, this act provoked one of the first secular protests which would ultimately lead to the constitution being pried from its Catholic roots. Back then, though, there was no notion of times a-changing: there was only indignation. As if the church’s litany of past abuses and present attacks on LGBT rights and unborn babies was not enough – now it was being insulated against any attack on its theological foundations.

Why, almost ten years later, has this indignation disappeared? Perhaps the repeal of Article 40.6.1 is a foregone conclusion. If so, are we certain this is a good idea?

The analogy which immediately springs to mind when we think of modern-day blasphemy is the Mohammed cartoons. The international wave of rage which rose as a result of these illustrations being published was undoubtedly out of proportion and contrary to any religion which preaches peace. Yet the cartoons themselves were intended to provoke, and masqueraded behind the concept of free speech.

via YouTube

All of us have our own sacred ideas. When the Catholic church covered up its abuses, and when it challenged the right of LGBTQ citizens to a normal life, it attacked thousands of people at their core. It dismissed the very grievances and decisions which defined its victim’s lives. To have its own tenets protected by law, then, is clearly unfair. And in an increasingly secular republic, free of its ties to religion, removing the word “blasphemy” from the constitution seems natural.

Yet, after a yes vote, the wording which would remain in article 40 holds little protection for anyone in the State, except the State itself. For people whose core values have been attacked, there is no apparent recourse (unless they have been publicly libelled). We are becoming a secular nation, yet we are also becoming multicultural; this means there are many other core values and opinions which define the millions of people who live under the constitution.

If the country votes to repeal this article, it will face a brand new challenge. The real issue which arises as a result of our silence over this amendment is the lack of specific legislation protecting the many core values which define modern Irish people. After the repeal of the 8th amendment was proposed, the Oireachtas committee made a decision, based on expert advice, about what exactly justified abortion in the aftermath of the vote. Yet there has been almost no discussion about what freedom of speech will look like if the referendum is passed. There is an inherent belief in this freedom, yet no discussion as to when it becomes abuse. In a healthy democracy, such silence is dangerous.

This amendment boils down to an “either/or” choice. Either the law protects the beliefs which are “sacred” to some or all of our citizens – religions included – or we remove this protection for all, creating something akin to a free-for-all society in which there are neither sacred cows nor respected beliefs.

The Housing Crisis: Money, Money, Money

As the Irish government’s annual Budget sinks more money into the housing market, Minister Eoghan Murphy is considering how many new printers his office will buy. How much of a difference will the Budget make to ordinary people caught in the Housing Crisis? For this, we need to look at the finances of an average couple.

Dear Minister,
How’s it going, Eoghan? Been keeping up with the presidential debates? Poor Michael D – getting a pasting on national radio over his earnings and his dogs. Still, it’s telling of the uncontroversial nature of the debates for our head of state when the worst assault you can launch on the incumbent is that his Burmese Mountain dogs are too well-groomed.

Source: Irish School of Ecunemics

In a similarly uncontroversial vein there was the Irish government’s annual budget, described variously as a “social democratic budget” and an “election budget”. Is there something we don’t know here, Eoghan? Are you and your mates gearing up for a fight?

I feel of late that it’s become my duty in these letters to you to shift your focus away from your grand, national schemes and question how much of an effect these have on the ground. We’ve already talked separately about the real issues that grassroots activists are facing in this housing crisis, and how much your Land Development Agency can actually do when there’s wasted tracts of land all over the country. Today’s letter will be vitriol-free (well, mostly): let’s take a sober look at your national budget by looking at the finances of a regular working couple.

For our experiment in simple arithmetic, we will take a couple living in south Dublin and making around €54K per year between them. This number will be important later so keep up. Lob off about 20% for tax (now we’re just north of €43K, and divide that number by 12 to see how much they take home between them each month. The answer: about €3,600.
Now consider this couple wants to save for a home. How much can they expect to put away each month? Let’s pick the low-hanging fruit first: rent. This couple will be paying around €2,058 per month (the average price of rental accommodation in their area, a number which makes their parents’ heart rates climb worryingly).

So they have the princely sum of €1,542 to play around with. At first glance this seems like a king’s ransom, right?

But wait – let’s hold off buying that diamond-encrusted bill-fold.

For starters, this couple – they have to live. So, they’ll need to spend around €492 on groceries. And if they’re going to make all this money in the first place, they’ll have to get to work and home, which will cost between €223 (if they stick to public transport) and €266 (if they drive a car, taxed and insured and running on unleaded petrol).
Assume the couple spends absolutely no more money in any given month: no holidays, no new clothes, not even as much as a coffee or a pint on the way home from work (and we can flat-out forget about having kids). What are we at now? Do the math and you’re left with €784. We’ll come back to this number in a minute.

Remember that number I asked you to remember earlier – the salary this “average” couple makes? It was chosen deliberately: €54K is smack bang in the middle of what property experts call “The Dead Zone”. This is an earnings bracket which gives its members a uniquely shitty deal in the housing crisis: they’re making too much to be eligible for social housing, and too little to actually afford an average home. In current market conditions, the couple can realistically expect a mortgage of €240,000 max. Yet, the average price of a home in south Dublin is €412K.
If this couple saves all €784 of their disposable income for a 10% discount on this mortgage, they can expect to be saving for two and a half years at least. And for what? To move to some town miles away from their family and friends, where they can’t afford any furniture and have to spend even more getting in and out of work just so they can keep up payments on their crappy little pile on the outskirts of nowhere?

So what, Eoghan, does your budget do for them? It’s supposed to be a housing-driven budget, sinking €2.4 billion into the ground – a 25% increase on last year. But jesus christ have we learned nothing from the past 10 years – or even these past 10 blog posts – to think that throwing money at a situation is going to fix it?

I know what you and your PR lackeys will say: this money is going to take the pressure off the market: build more social housing, and there will be less pressure on private homes.
But will this money really make the difference you say it will make? Already your office is spending €76 million of that budget for administration costs, “including a significant rise in the cost of office equipment”…I mean, how many goddam laserjet printers are you buying? The difference between your budget and our sorry couple’s is that yours isn’t entirely necessary. Even Michael D can get by on a fraction of your budget, and be able to justify it without resorting to stationery costs. The real cost, of course, comes with the quangos and bureaucracies through which the budget, like spring water through limestone, must pour down through until there is but a trickle in the end.

There is a marked difference between the actual effect of political decisions and the effect supposed by the politicians who make them. I’m almost sick to the back teeth of asking you to look around at the actual state of events in Ireland and ask yourself, Can I actually change any of this? And if so, how?

A good start: put down the office furniture catalogue.

All the best, Minister,
Simon

The Housing Crisis: Cut to the Chase

Or: “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running”. (The answer, unsurprisingly: parliamentary politics)

Dear Minister,
How’s it going Eoghan? Another tough week, eh? I was blessed with a few days away, but I kept a close eye on national events. I kept off Twitter, mind. Coming back from the break I felt a bit guilty, scrolling through all the tweets I’d missed. But then I realised I hadn’t really missed much. Nothing in real life has changed much. Let’s face it: Twitter is little more than a self-perpetuating machine of blather: if you’re not on it, you miss out but nothing much changes except that your life is much quieter. Have you tried it yourself?

At the weekend, I got caught up in a marathon. As a spectator, mind – not as a participant. I was on holiday in Galway, and some mad bureaucrat had decided it was a good idea to have 8,000 people run up and down Salthill strand while I was having a stroll there with M.

Best of luck to everyone taking part in the half marathon. 💪🏻 #rungalwaybay pic.twitter.com/0Rp6IQBlOs

— Run Galway Bay (@RunGalwayBay) October 6, 2018

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I felt bad about having a naggin of whiskey stuffed into my jacket pocket at 11 o’clock in the morning, but I was on holiday. And it was only when I walked past a playground full of kids that I got that tinge of guilt and self-loathing: the runners I couldn’t have given a damn about. Under other circumstances I would have been more than happy to take a swig in the middle of the two streams of runners, coming from and going to the end of the strand. As it was I subtly poured some into a cup of black coffee and went about my vacation.

I never went in for running. The way I figure, if you’re not running from something or running towards something, it’s just not worth it.

I’ve tried running multiple times, with mixed successes, but I’ve always done it alone. Like religion, exercise should be practiced in solitude. If you want to run a half-marathon of a Sunday morning, do it. Tell people you’ll do it, maybe, get a little money together for charity – but do it alone. There’s no need to show off about it. Doing so, in a crowd of thousands of other poor panting bastards, just makes for a fairly sorry show.

I know I’ll make some enemies with this post. No one likes a spoilsport – especially one with the smell of booze off him at 11am. And I’m about to shoot myself in the foot by saying that I love cycling to the top of a mountain. Alone. For no reason other than it’s there.
But when I talk about running, I’m not talking about running. I’m talking about a persistent collective act which has no apparent end-goal. I’m talking about ultimate aims.

I can hardly have a go at runners for doing something healthy. Self-improvement is the one goal every human should – but few humans do – pursue. It’s certainly the only aim that, after five years studying philosophy and a lifetime trying to Figure It All Out, I can firmly say: yes, this is something worthy of devoting one’s life to. But whisht – we’ll come back to this.
Similarly, politics is ostensibly about improvement. I would argue that even the most cynical of politicians at least started out wanting to help others, or improve society somehow. The weakest and most egocentric wanted to do so in order to gain recognition from their peers. Even after years of sycophancy and compromises in government, some politicians may even be pursuing the same aims to this day – caving into their whips’ demands on nationwide policy just for a little bit of pork barrel in the next budget to keep their dying midlands constituency in the black.

So improvement is hardly my bugbear here. It’s the collective nature of it, and the ultimate aim of this improvement. Why are these people running together? Do they have something to prove? Why would you display yourself – a hot, soaking mess trundling down the road in luminescent latex and undignified yellow bib – so early on the day of rest? And if you’re running to improve your health and your heart rate, why? What’s the ultimate aim? It doesn’t necessarily make you a more virtuous member of society, a better parent or a role model to others. Yes, I might be swigging whiskey on the side of the road, but I genuinely spend almost every waking moment contemplating and attempting to practice the ethical life (and I have yet to see how my drinking – or lack of running – clashes with that).

Similarly, much display has been made of the Private Members’ declaration last week of the housing crisis as a national emergency.

Government defeated on motion calling for housing crisis to be declared a national emergency https://t.co/ryLPOF8cco pic.twitter.com/R9fcb9G1Xu

— Independent.ie (@Independent_ie) October 4, 2018

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To a layman, the declaration looks impressive. It calls for politicians to accept that the housing policies “simply aren’t working”, and to pour more money onto the problem like fresh concrete into the ground.

But look a little deeper – from Simon Coveney’s watery response that he “understands the frustration” – and the whole thing becomes more diluted. Firstly, it’s not binding, and already Leo and you have admitted that it’s not going to make a whit of difference to the facts on the ground. It probably won’t even affect next week’s annual Budget.
If you know a little about parliamentary politics, the answer to the question how did it come about? is easy to answer. Clearly the Opposition, unable to move you – or move you out – during their failed no-confidence vote, sought to force your hand in another way.

So, what’s the point of it? Like running amidst thousands of people from one end of Salthill to the other, this motion amounts to little more than everyone looking good and keeping everything ticking over. The opposition TDs can’t be seen to be doing nothing – and most of their constituents will be suitably impressed by the “National Emergency” headline without troubling themselves too much with the details. Your government, unaffected in substance by the declaration, can continue running from media spots to county-council spats without actually achieving a hell of a lot. The collective parliamentary machine keeps running and every participant therein feels like they’ve done their part.

No sooner had the ink been spilled on this declaration than it disappeared, and the tenants and victims of homelessness in Ireland remained in their sorry position. There’s little doubt that at least some of the people in Buswell’s Bubble have the best interests of the country at heart. But you also have their own asses to look after, and you are locked in this dilemma of maybe wanting to do something good, but also having to look good – and, being stuck between the two, nothing actually gets done. And the rat race goes on.

All the best, Minister,
Simon

 

Featured image via Twitter

The Housing Crisis: The Kids Are Alright

Image via Twitter

As the minister just about survives a parliamentary motion, we move away from the parliamentary sporting arena and look at the housing crisis from the grassroots level.

Dear Eoghan,
How’s it going? Undoubtedly this email finds you recovering from weeks of sweat, cleaning the bile from your tailored suit and scrubbing parliamentarians’ blood from under your fingernails. You did well, by all accounts, surviving that no-confidence vote from Sinn Fein and their Independent allies. You even got Catherine Byrne on board – by fair means or foul.

Catherine Byrne plays ball, but blame game is far from over
via @IrishTimeshttps://t.co/AAOGh44WNl

— Pat Leahy (@PatLeahyIT) September 26, 2018

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What price did she pay for her support? Did you and Leo gang up on her and threaten her lowly Deputy Minister for State posting, as some would have it? Or did you finally cave and offer to back down on this parochial war you two are fighting about the social housing in Inchicore?

Who knows? Who cares? You got what you needed from her and you survived. You only had to take your two-hour beating in the Dáil and get back to work. Two hours! I could only watch pieces of it myself but the parade of politicians feigning anger was all that I could take. You were hunched to the left, resting your face on your fist and looking half-asleep and half-bored. No wonder. You knew you had the votes after you and Leo strong-armed Byrne, so there was no adrenaline-lined fight for survival against their accusations. It was one of those parliamentary procedures that you just had to sit through. What purgatory.

But I’m not going to waste my weekly email by talking about parliamentary matters. John Oliver once described politics as “sports for nerds” and we too often treat it that way, forgetting that these sports affect real people.

Some of those real people – over a thousand of them, in fact – were sitting on O’Connell Bridge on Saturday protesting the absurdity of all of this. I stayed well away, mind – I had to hustle: even on a Saturday, I have work to do. But it reminded me of my own days fighting Noel Dempsey over 3rd-level fees. We tied ourselves and locked ourselves into all kinds of government buildings. (Those were the days…) We didn’t have the balls to clog up a whole transpontine thoroughfare. But hey – if an oversized LUAS train can do it, why not people with a purpose?

We have every corner of O’Connell Street blocked off. Take Back the City by name, Take Back the City by nature pic.twitter.com/XMJeV2QZOy

— Take Back The City – Dublin (@TBTCDublin) September 22, 2018

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Don’t be fooled by their youth and attendant phone-fumbling: these are some serious characters, with razor-sharp technique. The group which organised the sit-in is Take Back the City – an umbrella organisation with 18 groups working for the same purpose: to help out during, or defeat, the current housing crisis. These groups include Dublin Central Housing Action, Housing & Homeless Coalition and the Trinity Postgraduate Students’ Union.

Last week, two of their members spoke to the Irish Times and, while you could tell they were kids (they were in turns giggly and verbose), they were far superior to most of the talking heads appearing on Irish media – y’know, the kind of “experts” whose exude such little charisma that a bowl of cold porridge could have a serious chance of beating them if it came down to it.

These two kids were at least bubbly and informative. They spoke a little about their own lives (it was here that they got a little wordy) but when it came down to the brass tacks of the issue at hand – i.e., the housing crisis – they were both professional and profound in their description of the cut and thrust of their campaign. Above all, through details and statistics, they filled in the gaps so often made between political rhetoric and mass media.

The one thing they have you both beat on is solutions.  The solutions that are coming from the government are either in their infancy (your Land Development Agency) or as lukewarm and watery as the above-mentioned bowl of porridge (the Private Members’ proposal to throw money at the problem, along with higher quotas for social housing new builds).
The activists’ proposals, however, are much more elegant and immediate. They’re asking your government to grow a pair and CPO any property which is sitting idle. Secondly, anyone who’s flipping properties anonymously should sign a public order if and when they want to kick out a tenant: let them have the balls to come out into the open. Lastly – and here’s the kicker you’re going to hate, minister – rent caps. Long the call of the fringe left-wing, it’s moving closer to the political center as this crisis deepens.

You might argue, minister, that these kids are outside the political arena: their ideas are, at best, naive. But they have cut their teeth already, in places like Apollo House; they are on the frontlines of the housing crisis that are so far removed from your parliamentary chair. They see how your policies play out, for better or worse, in the petri dish of inner-city Dublin.

Their proposals might reek of socialism, but do you have a better offer? The notion of an interventionist government pulling and poking at the property market is probably abhorrent to you. But this is already happening anyway: the state already holds a big stake in the market, but uses it in a cack-handed way. And the back-and-forth between you and the opposition politicians isn’t producing any significant fix. In fact, we’re all sick to death of it: it is interesting only as a spectator sport. And who has time for sports when we can’t afford homes, and we’re being thrown out by bailiffs in balaclavas? Sitting down with a couple of activists isn’t as desperate a move as you might think (or your opponents might portray). Let your conservatism bounce off their radicalism and see what compromises you come up with.

So don’t dismiss the kids, minister. Let them roar their demands, even if they are holding up the traffic. Remember life at that age? Remember the energy and the idealism? Even in your UCD days, you had to have gotten a taste of that. I certainly did. And I found it abhorrent that I would ever live a life where I would have to compromise with these ideas of freedom and equality. Yet here we are. We have become “the man”, who grumbles at the traffic on O’Connell Street Bridge, or tells the kids that what they want just can’t be done, and anyway this is the way things are and have always been.

All the best, minister,
Simon

The Housing Crisis: On Wasted Empty Space

A tour of the southern reaches of the country provokes reflections on the notion of ‘undeveloped land’ and the pernicious view that it will fix the housing crisis in Ireland.

Dear Eoghan,
How’s it going? Have you overcome the panic sweats of the past week or two? Take comfort from the nostalgia of your holiday last month. Turns out I should’ve done my research before my missive some weeks ago [URL: Pope’s Skoda], in which I guessed you were in the French Riviera or some such salubrious place. No sooner had I sent the email than a friend, who had just returned from the Camino himself, informed me that you were on the very same walk yourself.

Some walk that. Not a bad choice for a government Minister: my rambler friend mused that all politicians should experience the Camino, the implication being that after such an experience one realises the futile self-interest of a life in politics.
But I wonder why you chose to go there. Did you feel you had to atone? Or was it a polling decision? (Hey, this isn’t as uncommon as you’d think. Back in ’94,  after the US Democrats had been routed in the mid-terms, Bill Clinton polled voters on how he should spend his next summer break. Poor Bill: after a hammering like that he just wanted to unwind with a round of golf but the voters told him to go camping with his family instead. The life of a politician…)

I hope that the trip did you good, especially in hindsight. Whilst you were gurning through the 9th circle of hell last week, perhaps once or twice an image of open Spanish vistas flashed through your mind to remind you that a better life was possible, albeit ever so far away.

I had a similar thought myself two weeks ago whilst standing in an Ikea warehouse on the outskirts of north Dublin – my own Dante-esque tragi-comedy.

Because, while you were doubtlessly racking up new records on your FitBit last month, I was on a pilgrimage of my own. For four days I cycled the West-Cork leg of the Wild Atlantic Way. Goddammit, who designed that thing? As if the relentless ridges of West Cork weren’t enough, I had to take absurd diversions devised by some tourism bureaucrat.
But it’s hard to complain about West Cork for any prolonged amount of time, not when you’re surrounded by such beauty. It’s a place where the landscape is wild, the people are wilder, and the booze and food among the finest in the world.
Ever been there, Eoghan? Good for the soul – even better for the poll.

Fast forward two weeks later, and I’m contemplating the artifice of the Ikea shopping experience. I’m standing in a frozen queue, commanding an oversized trolley of flatpack items which I’ve picked out after hours of measuring and negotiating and following arrows through a swamp of consumers towards this terminus at the end of the world…I haven’t had this much fun since my last Ryanair flight.

Suddenly I’m seized by a shudder. It’s been building up for hours, but it finally hits when I see a couple and their two kids, standing two queues over to my left with two trolleys full of nothing but flowers. Fake flowers. One of the kids moans up to his mom, “This place is boring” – but it sounds less like a complaint, more like a statement of fact. Thirty years older than him and I can’t find much reason to disagree. His parents have abandoned the outside world – full of autumnal sunshine and forests full of flowers – for this windowless misery.

The lengths we go to just to get our homes in order. What on earth are we doing here? How unnatural all of this is.

I’d like to blame West Cork for all of this: having reconnected with the wonder of the outside world, the purgatory of a Swedish furniture store hits me especially hard. When I wasn’t huffing it up one hill or another on the south coast, I had my head stuck in a book about ancient and medieval history. The rolling hills and ancient history can make for quite a combination: you feel as if you are living in both the present and past at once.
(It would be facile to idealise the medieval times, of course. This, after all, was a time when servants who fell foul of the king would have their thumbs chopped off. That said, if that punishment had survived to the present day, we’d have a handy solution to errant tweets from the likes of Elon Musk.)
Nevertheless, in the midst of that landscape, you can practically see the ancient unchanged land. Sweep away the houses and tarmacadamed roads, keep a sprinkling of castles, and you’re there. All around you is empty, untamed space.

One of the most pernicious terms ever invented is that of “undeveloped land”. Planners and property developers can’t see an empty space for what it is, but for what it is not. It is a physical space on which humans have not yet built – the operative word being yet. Needless to say, with this compulsive view, their heads would be spinning in West Cork,

You can already see the effect they’ve had on the land there, and it’s not a pretty one. In the best-case scenario, they’ve built housing units – machines for living in – where once there was fallow field. In the worst – and most common – scenario, they’ve started building some stately home but got bored or went broke halfway through. In either situation, the result is ugly: a mass of symmetrical concrete in the midst of so much nature.

The Celtic Tiger did the worst damage. The countryside is peppered with hulks, husks of houses half-built and left to rot for 15 years. Probably the worst example of this is Owenahincha.

Jesus that place is a dive. It’s hardly comparable with places of natural butt-fugliness, like Tallaght or (Jesus help us) Leitrim, which God clearly farted out and then left behind like a failed construction project.
Cycle down the main drag in Owenahincha and there’s a lovely saltiness in the air; the waves of the Atlantic lap up to the shore on your left. But on the right are two hotels with the paint peeling off.

Image via Irish Examiner

Further along the road you’re confronted with a truly horrible juxtaposition: on one side, a house which has been abandoned for years, half-developed and – even worse – a house which was half-built and abandoned just a few months ago.

For the love of all that is good and holy – you want to just slap your face in desperation – does nobody learn from the past? Is it not bad enough that you’re building a new home when there’s a half-built house right across the street ? Why would you pour money into the ground when there’s a reminder in plain sight (replete with cracked concrete and dogshit) of how terrible an idea that is? 

Seen in this light, your Land Development Agency seems as absurd as a Saturday spent in Ikea. It comes from a good place – I still believe that – and I know you are paying heed to half of the property experts (or at least those who don’t have their fingers on the scales). These experts have been bemoaning the fact that 50% of the available land in Dublin is held by the State. Their bottom line: actively manage the land, even if it means selling it at a discount.
According to the other half of the experts, though, you might well be barking up the wrong tree. Given that a hundred and eighty thousand properties are vacant in Ireland, they say, it is a false prophet who promises to save the country by building more.

Who knows which side is right?
Despite my slandering of my hometown earlier, I will say that growing up in Tallaght involved a lot of green spaces. In nearby Firhouse, they were everywhere, but are now being eaten up. In 2015, local residents in Ballycullen protested against one of these spaces being swallowed up, but they quickly had to back down when it was revealed that a school was slated to be built there. Who can argue against a school? Kids need education. And over the past few  years, estates have sprung up all over the place, creating a greater pressure for local services.
Climb a few kilometers up to the nearby Hell Fire Club and you get a wonderful vista of the city, and a sharp illustration of what’s happening to our green country. I’ve been going up there since I was a kid, and every time you get a snapshot of the urban sprawl: the grey city limits creep closer and ever closer towards the hillside, eating up every space in sight.

Build, baby, build.

All the best, minister,
Simon

The Housing Crisis: Hang On In There, Minister

As Dublin’s housing crisis takes a violent turn, and Minister for Housing Eoghan Murphy fights a tide of opposition, we feel a strange, momentary sympathy for him.

Dear Minister,
How’s it going Eoghan? Or, rather, how worried should we be about you? I saw you the other day, believe it or not, looking pretty addled in Clement and Pekoe. I was sitting at the window when a black car with tinted windows pushed its way through the morass and spewed out a sweaty, pale mess of a man in a tailored suit. You walked right past me, up to the counter and ordered. You sat down with your tea and flipped out your phone. I wondered for a while if I should say something to you but I saw the state you were in – frantically bashing your phone between mad, panicked glances around the shop – and that made my mind up. It was as if someone was out to get you. God knows how you would have reacted to a crank constituent like me. I elected instead to sit and marvel at the coincidence of seeing my number one politician losing his mind mere meters away from me. Soon the marvel turned to concern, and a whole train of thought.

Small town, eh?

The kind of small town where, if the cops pull up to a house wearing balaclavas and help similarly-dressed thugs break in – well, that’s the kind of news that spreads quickly. 

via Twitter

This is the ugly side of our housing crisis. We can discuss statistics and mortgage rates all day, but these can rarely be connected to day-to-day life. Not until something like this happens do we connect the dots and realise that real human beings are at the business end of all of this and holy shit are they coming for me?

Oh, there’s justification for all of this I’m sure. The tenants were squatters; the Gardai were covering their faces up to prevent an acid attack; the house invasion was justified under such and such an order of the constitution. But the optics aren’t great, are they Minister?

No wonder you were having your nineteenth nervous breakdown when I saw you. I don’t know that you had the balls (and lack of foresight) to order this yourself. But it’s coming back on you. You’re fighting a rising tide: a torrent of godawful, shit-strained sewage is lapping closer and closer to your feet, subsuming your political ground and any good act you try to do.

Like the Land Development Agency you launched yesterday. What a great idea – what awful timing. I bet you were sitting on it for ages, waiting for that moment to unleash it on the country, fix the entire crisis and shore up your political currency in one fell swoop. And then all of this happens.
I watched your interview about it on RTE intently, studying your eyes, looking for signs of the latent panic and helplessness which I encountered in that coffee shop.

With the new Land Development Agency we want to use state land in strategic areas to bring forward development of new housing. I spoke to @rtenews today about the role the agency will play. pic.twitter.com/XLUo2cTQIe

— Eoghan Murphy (@MurphyEoghan) September 13, 2018

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You put on a brave face. But you must have known, coming as this did mere hours after your government’s goons violently broke into a house, that this initiative would come across as a damp squib. Cynics might even see it as a desperate PR play.

But don’t worry, Eoghan, I know the pressure you’re under.

You must’ve thought that the writing was on the wall when you heard the socialists had decided to back up Sinn Féin in their no-confidence vote against you at their pre-Dáil  “think-in”.

Solidarity-PBP to support motion of no confidence in Housing Minister Eoghan Murphy in the coming weeks pic.twitter.com/ADm5E0KhRM

— RTÉ News (@rtenews) September 11, 2018

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(“Think-in”? Think-in?  What, have they got Stewart bloody Pearson running the show over there now?)

I’d say you’ll survive their no-confidence vote, but it must have you rattled. You must’ve felt the chills when you heard them outside Leinster House – those barbarians at the gate – baying for your blood.
Holy shit, are they coming for me? 

Fear not, though: that motion is nothing more than a political machination, a storm in a teacup inside a little bubble which extends no further than Buswell’s on Molesworth Street to the Oscar Wilde statue.
A book I read recently has me thinking about that bubble, and the precarious situation you’re in. It’s called Why We Get the Wrong Politicians but a better title for it would be “Politics Will Eat Itself“. It talks about the path which British politicians take to power, and the cannibalistic culture they encounter when they get there.
The author, Isabel Hardiman, describes the sheer amount of money that candidates pay for the privilege of a parliamentary seat (the average cost of Westminster campaigns cost the candidate between £13K & £121K). She talks about candidates who “end up sobbing on their kitchen floors night after night after reading streams of personal abuse over email and social media”.
One thing Hardiman doesn’t explain, though, is why on earth a would-be politician would put themselves through this. She comes close by citing a neuroscientist who explains that  “…the brains of people in power change as they experience more of it. Power – and sex- causes a surge in testosterone.”
But any power-hungry candidate must be disappointed by what they encounter when they get to parliament: a self-perpetuating culture of gossip, power-mongering and in-fighting where hardly anything gets done. Although Hardiman writes about Westminster, the facts in Leinster House (or what we’ll call “the Buswell’s Bubble”) can’t be too different. I have a deeper understanding of – and sympathy for- your position now, Eoghan. Why you chose this path is beyond me, but I can see what you’re up against.

In an earlier missive, you may remember, I said that I didn’t have the cajones for politics, specifically because I couldn’t with a straight face declare that I had the answers to the country’s problems.
Now I now see that there’s more to it than that. As a politician, you have a level of responsibility which I just couldn’t handle. Invested in you is, if not the power to inflict violence and suffering with a single assent, then the liability (both moral and public) when such violence occurs. In my job I have power over, and responsibility for, only a small group of people; I now realise that I made this choice deliberately. The kind of weight a politician carries would bring me down; I’d wake up in cold sweats and question my every move throughout the day. I’d be in a café wondering who there was watching me, are they finally coming for me?

In realising this, I had an overwhelming feeling which allowed me to pack up my things a moment later and leave you in peace. It was a feeling of sympathy. It’s something that, I think, we’re all lacking in – not least the political and social systems of which you are the head. Sure, if we want to, we can explain away the reasons for our predicaments – how the tenants of North Frederick Street were really just squatters, and how you consciously chose the path you took to this den of paranoia (and hey, if you didn’t know it would end this way, you’re naive). This is how bureaucrats and journalists and online trolls work: they justify their action or inaction by effectively saying, well, you deserve it.
But none of this helps. It’s much easier to do it, though, than to look at each other and understand that we’re all human beings, and we’re all vulnerable. Your government is coming for its citizens, Eoghan; its knives are sharpened and its senses dulled. Your opponents are coming for you, in a foray of equal malice and intent. The only way we’ll both come out of this alive is by understanding each other, and allowing this understanding to lead to compassionate action.

With that notion, I packed my bag, muttered “Best of luck, minister,” under my breath, and walked out into the hazy morning.

All the best, minister,
Simon

The Housing Crisis: The Pope’s Skoda

The Pope’s visit to Dublin not only causes traffic jams – it throws up a whole swathe of questions about who we are and what we do. The missives on Dublin’s Housing Crisis continue.

Dear Eoghan,
How’s it going? Enjoying the summer break? I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Ah! The life of a parliamentarian. Whilst the rest of us plebians are working through the sunshine (and rain, and storms – what is it with this purgatorial place?) you’re “not in session”. Presumably you’re on someone’s yacht atop an azure blue ocean. Likewise, I bet you didn’t need to pick a path through Temple Bar as His Holiness was pontificating to the maximum up in Dublin Castle today.

Clearly, whosoever says that the power of the #Catholic #church is fading has never tried to go about their business while the pope is in town. #PopeinIreland #traffic #Dublin

— Simon MG (@proteksblue) August 25, 2018

Or maybe you did. I’d love to have been a fly on the wall in the room where the Pontifex walks up to you steely-eyed, the beneficent smile completely evaporated, and asks, “Well, Minister – how are you keeping the people here? Everyone got a roof over their heads?” For all your learning, I bet you’d struggle with an answer. Even your PR tricks can’t work against this man. Jaysis, Eoghan, his institution practically invented public relations.

Anyway, as we’re about to see, that meeting is not likely to happen. There’s an equal chance that my bank manager will call me up and offer me a loan, so let’s move on…
Sifting through the dross the newspapers have had on offer the past few weeks, I came across a curious piece of trivia. Do you know what kind of car the Pope is parading around Dublin in this weekend? No? It’s a Skoda. Some weird kind of corporate tie-in with the Catholic church means Francis will sacrifice papal luxury for some savvy product placement.
We were blessed with this gem of wisdom some weeks ago by The Irish Times. You can imagine most of Ireland responded with a collective, and puzzled, shrug.
So what? There were a thousand more pertinent facts we wanted to know about the papal visit. Would he consult any victims of clerical abuse while he’s here? What, if anything, would he say about poverty in Ireland, about the secularization of the country, about our new laws on same-sex marriage and abortion? Would he face down our rabid communist of a president on the lawn of the Áras an Uachtaráin?

Here’s another weird juxtaposition courtesy of the Irish Times. Half of the families who ended up sleeping in Garda stations were either Romanian or from the travelling community. This headline – which predictably appeared soon after that picture of Margaret Cash’s kids  passed out in Tallaght Garda station – contained a comparison seemingly as random as the Pope in a Skoda. But the implication is much more sinister. Read between the lines and you’ll see the comparison the newspaper is really making: these people are not us, and they don’t deserve the welfare the state might provide.
This story, of course, is a cop-out – any educated fool should be able to see that. It rules out any critical thinking. And if you want proof of it, just look at the comments, full of reprehensible opinions with even worse grammar.

But, to paraphrase a verse from the Pope’s favourite book, The sun rises and the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike. When you’re so down and out that you have to sleep with your family in a police station, it hardly matters where you’re from – except, apparently, to the media. And maybe even to those who are supposed to be providing you with emergency accommodation.

Likewise, when the Pope has finished parading through Ireland in his Skoda, what will he have seen? What he wants to see, presumably: the crowds at Phoenix Park, but not the millions of lapsed Catholics; the steeples of the buildings, but not the homeless who cower below; the resplendent bishops’ palaces, but not the ghost estates.
Obviously, he hasn’t met abuse victims – or at least he hasn’t publicised it. Nor has he addressed the liberalisation of Ireland. And he gave no more than lip service to the growing population of Ireland’s poor or just-about-managing. And why not? Because to do so would be to admit that he – or rather his institution – has become alienated from the suffering they’re supposed to address. And to do so would be to admit that they can’t – or won’t – fix them.

Just as the Pope must face up to the truths of New Ireland, no matter how much of a challenge it is, we have a duty to help those who are left out in the unrelenting night, when we have all escaped inside, no matter the challenge. But hey – isn’t it just much easier to leave a snarky comment on Facebook?

All the best, minister,
Simon

The Housing Crisis: The Blame Game

Dublin’s housing crisis continues, and Ireland’s media and citizens are asking questions about who’s to blame. The answer? Well, nobody really…

Dear Eoghan,
How’s it going? Things are really heating up on Kildare Street, eh? Who knows where the next rabid attack is coming from? It must be enough to drive you to madness, or at least to the attic of the Dail with a bottle you stole from the bar.

I have to admit, I was in a bit of a funk myself until recently. Maybe it’s because I’ve found a place to live, and with all the drama of that having died down, the righteous anger abandoned me. In any case, I’m thinking too rationally.
I tried all kinds of things. I read: I leafed through Fear and Loathing ’72, and A People’s History of the United States – even the goddam Bunreacht na hEireann. But nothing was getting me out of this.
I listened to a podcast about the RFK assassination. The RFK Tapes it’s called. It’s a rollicking tour around the various conspiracy theories surrounding poor Bobby’s death, where they’re looking for someone to blame – anyone except Sirhan Sirhan (the convicted assassin), from a racist security guard, a girl in a polkadot dress and some weird 60s cult of meditation. “That’s a lot of dots to join,” says the presenter at one stage, and he’s right. It’s too simple to say it was just a doe-eyed drunk Palestinian who shot him dead and here I go with the rational thinking again.

https://open.spotify.com/embed/episode/5KFYkkS51TTDmelT13z21e

I needed to get back in the game. I needed that feeling again – to run out onto the street, half-naked, ranting about the Russians interfering in my local GAA club committee election from right there! my finger jabbing southward across the Dodder, right there in their bunker on Orwell Road!

I restrained myself. I poured a measure of Jameson Crested into a cup of black coffee and I did what any self-respecting millenial does in times of mental crisis: I started flicking through social media. That’s when I found what I needed. It was that story Una Mullaley wrote about you in the Irish Times last week. That can’t have gone down well in the office. If she wasn’t pulling you apart for your choice of shirts, she was accusing you of After the piece – or maybe because of it – there were whole swathes of Twitter on fire with conspiracy theories about how your government are artifically inflating house prices and the like.

Anna Kavanagh:
“Once upon a time our children dreamed of buying a house. Now they can’t even dream of renting a house. This didn’t happen by chance. Fine Gael have deliberately driven up rent and house prices, creating artificial scarcity, by not building social housing.” pic.twitter.com/f5KIEVDQTE

— Frankie Gaffney (@FrankieGaffney) August 12, 2018

I bolted upright and slammed my fist on the table. How dare they, those dilettantes! I fumed, Haven’t they heard of Occams Razor?!

Now, for an educated philosopher such as yourself, Eoghan, Occam’s Razor needs no introduction. But for others (and here I’m thinking about your PA, who actually reads these screeds, and of the 6 people who actually read my blog) it might beggar an explanation.
Occam’s Razor states simply that the simplest explanation is usually the right one. Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate: don’t go adding layers of explanation if there’s no need for them. If a Spanish tourist was stumbling around town with a cheap green hat on and mumbling incoherently, then he probably just had a few too many pints in Temple Bar. Only an idiot – or a crank – would posit that the man had been poisoned by the government.

Likewise, think of the landlords in Ireland – those “rabid sheep” I talked about a few weeks ago – or the estate agents who are running this madcap rental market.
Do any of these people know what they’re doing? Every second tenant in Ireland seems to think they’re out to get our money, that there’s some conspiracy to completely screw young hard-working people the whole country over.
The first part is probably true: estate agents are undoubtedly out to get our money. How does that make them different to any other capitalist venture, founded upon taking somebody else’s money and declaring it as your own? And how different to people in general, all of us who run after profit, or sex, or power – anything to give us the same feeling we got from sucking on our mother’s teat, anything that will make us feel like we’re the center of the universe?

But the second part? Please. Estate agents are just blindly chasing money like prospectors in an oil field. Where, in this rat race, would they find the time? The estate agent from my last apartment can barely manage an accurate ESB meter reading, never mind collude with other estate agents in an industry-wide attempt to squeeze the rental market til the pips squeak.

This is who we are, Eoghan. Occam’ s Razor dictates that there are no conspiracies: people are stupid and self-serving, not evil and collaborative.

So what of your government? Are you all in it together to screw the citizens on behalf of your real-estate friends? For this, we have to go back to the RFK Tapes.

I realized what wasn’t sitting right with me about that podcast. The RFK assassination isn’t as simple a situation as a drunken tourist in Dublin. It’s a vastly complex affair, laced with meaning and implication. That’s the attraction towards thinking it was orchestrated by some vast conspiracy. And I’m not saying that there wasn’t a conspiracy; Bobby’s death certainly served lot of vested interests (the CIA to start). But the circumstances of his death weren’t so complex. I’ll not bore you with the details but suffice to say the simplest explanation is that he was shot by Sirhan Sirhan (that doe-eyed, drunk Palestinian): Sirhan and Sirhan only.

Likewise, the property situation in Ireland. It’s a complete clusterfuck – a truly tragic one at that – with layers upon layers of implication and emotion and vested interests.
But to put you at the centre of this vast web of intricacy, plucking the various threads in orchestra – that would give you too much credit. Where the cranks online got it wrong is to think – as all humans do – that their political representatives are somehow above all this. That’s where politicians like you and Justin McAleese get it wrong too: you run elections and PR campaigns on promises of your superhuman ability. When you actually get into power, of course, you spend most of your time with civil servants (who tell you how few of your promises you can actually keep) and PR staff (who persuade us, the public, that you can).

So, you’re not responsible for this mess, but are you in no way able to fix it.

On second reading, I see that this is where Una Mullaley gets it right. Unlike the rest of the Twittersphere, she doesn’t point the conspiratorial finger at you. Sure, she says, you’ve been “juking the stats”, and you’ve backtracked on promises to empower the Government over local councils and private developers. But there’s no explicit malice in your actions. Her article simply states that you had not done the things you said you would do – hardly a new claim for a journalist to make about a politician.

So the sorry carousel goes around. The dispossessed tenants and young families are the unmoving horses; you and the bureaucrats are riding on top, fighting about the how to shut the whole thing down, while a jittery businessman stands with his finger hovering over the on-off switch.

What a conspiracy.

All the best, minister,
Simon

The Housing Crisis: Moving Out, Moving In

One week in Ireland’s housing crisis provokes different reactions. In the latest missive to Housing Minister Eoghan Murphy, we try to evaluate three of these reactions.

Dear Eoghan,
Again, this post was almost never written – busy as I have been with moving out of one place, and into another. Of course a missed missive would hardly have broken your heart. Your personal assistants don’t even email me anymore- not so much as a perfunctory thank you we’ll be in touch – so I think I’ve finally graduated to the “crank” category. Now I only get the weekly updates your automated marketing service and man does THAT feel sad.

Of course, from what I hear, you’ve enough on your plate – what with having to move out of your constituency office.

Housing minister ‘effectively homeless’ after closing constituency office https://t.co/nBiVwTVJr3 pic.twitter.com/MUw0haAh4S

— Independent.ie (@Independent_ie) August 8, 2018

I won’t dwell on the irony, delicious as it is. But what the hell is happening, dear Eoghan, when the very Minister for Housing has been ordered out of his own rented accommodation? Is the revolution eating its children?

You’re not the only one to be forced out, if that’s any consolation. Did you hear about David Kitt? He owns a flat in Dublin that he’s being forced out of. His Facebook post – and the stories of other artists being forced out of the city – made grimly familiar reading for many of us.

i'm being forced to leave the country i love as i can't afford to live in my hometown any more. i don't want to go. it…

Posted by David Kitt on Sunday, 29 July 2018

Meanwhile, on the other side of town, people are moving in. You must’ve scrunched up your nose when you saw the headline: Housing groups occupy vacant Dublin building. Exasperation may even have boiled over into fury as you scanned through the article. What were these people trying to achieve, with their Leo masks and their banners hanging out of the first-floor window?  And some of them were Trinity students forgodsake! Scions of the upper-middle class! What were they thinking?

Cynics regarding the same headlines undoubtedly rolled their eyes. Nothing more than a bunch of dispossessed anarchists and idealists. Apollo House this protest might turn out to be, but hardly a French Revolution, with the sans culottes at the vanguard.
Undoubtedly, these same cynics (or, as they prefer to be called, realists) weren’t surprised at the fate of the musicians: they’re artists, after all – it’s a piss-poor job, but it’s the life they’ve chosen.”
In a way, of course, they’d be right. Realistically speaking, the market is heating up and only the richest can stick around. Let the market forces do their work, even if it means Kitt et al have to flee to Berlin or Co. Kildare. It’s the life they’ve chosen.

But is it really? And does any of this thinking help us to get closer to a solution?

As luck would have it, a solution has also raised itself in the surprising form of a log cabin. Dozens of them have been springing up around the city, providing a home for couples who, in another generation would otherwise have been able to buy, instead of build, their own home.

These couples are both realists and idealists, and they buck the trend of people fleeing the city centre. As realists, they recognise their place in current-day Ireland: they’re in the “dead zone” – the income bracket which means that they can neither afford a home in Dublin nor apply for a home under social housing. As idealists, they believe that the life that they have chosen should not preclude the home that they want. In other words, they have chosen to be teachers or office staff, but they don’t see that they should be denied a home in the capital just because of this.

So they do what any red-blooded member of a capitalistic society such as ours is supposed to do: they take the initiative. They roll up their sleeves and erect a home on a vacant plot (usually their parents’ back garden) – or, more likely, pick up the phone and have someone else build it for the affordable price of €35,000.
It’s a simple start: a declaration of intent to live and contribute to a thriving society – just as the pioneers on the Appalachian trail form the present-day mythology of capitalist America. Above all, they are bowing to market forces, and using their idealism and determination to carve out their own niche in the midst of the property crisis.

So far, so capitalistic. But wait! There’s a snag. Already, Dublin City Council has thrown sand in the gears. Complaints have been made about these log cabins – they’re an “eyesore” to the owners of properties ten times their price. As if the Council didn’t have enough work to do, dragging its feet over providing homes and renovating vacant properties, it has decided in its eternal wisdom to spend time considering whether or not to clamp down on those who just can’t wait.

When you look at this kind of situation, the cat-calls of the protesters don’t seem so revolutionary, nor does the plight of the musicians seem so easy to brush aside. We’ve all made an implicit contract with the government (as a politics student yourself, Eoghan, I’m sure you’ve read Rousseau), but that contract isn’t being fulfilled. In return for our consent and orderly behaviour, you’re supposed to provide us with things like safety, healthcare – and shelter. When you can’t do this, the more law-abiding of us complain or leave; the more entrepreneurial provide for themselves; the more anarchic rise up. At the very least, all of these are natural expressions of the social contract. Although this moment in Irish politics is not the start of a revolution, in it can be found the threads of discontent that make for one.

I’ll finish again with an anecdote. I was chatting with a friend of mine the other week about this very blog. After he’d listened to me banging on for 10 minutes, he shrugged and asked, “So what’s the solution?”
I spluttered, searching for an answer. Eventually I had to concede, “I have no solution.” But in that I found my raison d’ecriter: “But I’m like a philosopher on the Titanic!” I roared, “Yes, the ship is going down and in a moment I’ll run for the lifeboats. But this situation is absolutely absurd, and I think we should take a moment to think about that. This is supposed to be an unsinkable ship, and on its first voyage – it’s fucking sinking!”

That continues to be my job, Eoghan. It doesn’t pay the bills (yet) and maybe I’ll start coming up with solutions soon. Or I’ll just start chopping wood.

All the best Minister,
Simon

Title image: Teddy Kelley