The Housing Crisis: The Politicians We Deserve

The politicans we have are exactly what we deserve.
Dear Minister,
How’s it going Eoghan? Helluva weekend for you, what with your parties and running half-marathons. Have we not talked about marathons, Eoghan? Do you not listen to a word I’ve said? No, of course you don’t – it’s your PA who reads these letters before resigning them to the recycling bin. If I’m lucky. I’m betting instead that some automated bot seeks out my mad rantings and deletes them before they even make it to your inbox.

Great to get out this morning and do @poolbegparkrun – big thanks to the organisers and volunteers who make it easy on a Sat morning #loveParkRun pic.twitter.com/0HDgg15Kdk

— Eoghan Murphy (@MurphyEoghan) January 19, 2019

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Anyway, I see you got a Golden Ticket to Leo’s birthday bash on Saturday. I carefully traced the cabinet’s movements through a week of “think ins” and “break out sessions” to a bitch-fight about who was and wasn’t going to the top dog’s birthday party and I’ve concluded that you should all be thrown out of government, and back into the private sector. There, at least, you can talk and carry on like that without having to maintain the pretence that you are somehow dedicated to representing the people of Ireland.
I would love to have been a fly on the wall in Medley when the news broke that the Brits wanted to talk about a separate treaty with Ireland, over the heads of the EU leaders. How do you deal with such a complex, far-reaching proposal when all you want to do is get soaked in Cristal and then run to the bathroom to refresh yourself?
I can imagine the conversation when the news came in. Leo sees a low-level aide striding towards him across the dancefloor. “Emmet,” he fumes, “How did you get in here?”
Emmet pants: “I told Matt that I was here on official business,” and hands him a note.
Leo glances askance at his partner Matt before looking down at the note. His brow furrows.
“Simon!” he shouts across the table. “Get your nose out of there and take a look at this.”
Coveney stumbles over and peers at the note. “For Chrissakes,” he snorts, “I’m on my night off. Can we not get Charlie Flanagan to take care of this?” He looks around the room for the justice minister.
“Simon, do you honestly think I’d invite that glass of stagnant tapwater to my birthday party?”
Coveney scratches his head for a moment and then thrusts the note back over to Emmet the aide. “Tell them no. And have my assistant put out a tweet early tomorrow. Something about being ‘united and focused on protecting Ireland’, blah blah blah. Now, where was I? Lucinda, turn off that shite! It’s my bloody turn on the iPod!” With that, Emmet leaves, Simon and Leo go back to their respective activities, and you’re sitting on the edge of the table, wondering how the hell you can get in on the next of those high-level decision-making convos.
On Sunday morning, whilst you were no doubt nursing a hangover brought on by too many appletinis, I was perusing the weekend papers and came across a story from my hometown, Firhouse. Beneath a picture of the town’s disused Carmelite monastery beamed the familiar grin of local councillor Brian Lawlor – a middle-aged low-level hack who, as such, was almost certainly not invited to Leo’s soiree.

Image via Twitter

For some months, plans have been underway to convert this now-disused monastery into a homeless hub. Last week, Lawlor planted his stout frame right in front of these plans, ostensibly because he was concerned that the property “is not suitable for families.” He mentioned a “very small number” of constituents who had raised concerns about the nine-acre site being converted into homeless accommodation, but I know he’s drastically understating that number. I’ve heard mutterings about this plan all around town, from NIMBYs like my father (still the only Irish Trump supporter I know). Hadn’t they enough on their plate with the bloody Scientologists setting up shop in the old Victory Centre, without homeless delinquents wandering their streets at night like ogres from an old Punch cartoon? They would preface every such comment with “Now, I have nothing against housing the homeless, but…” in the same way that people precede caustic remarks with “No offence” or who, back in the day, would protest that some of their best friends were gay.
As his sucker-punch, Lawlor dragged you into it, saying that if you told An Bord Pleanala that they didn’t need to go through the planning-permission process, then fair enough. Read, instead: “Look, no one here wants this homeless shelter, but if the government says we have to have it, then the blame’s on them.” So let me get the popcorn, sit down, and see how you two slog this one out. Your quick-footedness against his girth. Good luck, minister – Lawlor may be a low-level apparatchik, but he’s a big fella, and I wouldn’t want to get in the way of those swinging meaty fists of his.
In his pandering to local NIMBYism, Lawlor represented the seedy side of the “human, all too human” kind of politician that I discussed some months ago. Then, I argued that Irish politicians could rarely be blamed for vast conspiracies or evil-doing because they’re (you’re) fallible, banal human beings who make mistakes like the rest of us. Looking at Lawlor, though, I’m starting to see the dark side of this banality. He could take the moral high road and, over the objections of his constituents, let the homeless people in. Instead he’s using a pretty weak argument about planning permission to look like he’s on their side. In other words, he’s not being a leader. And if the shepherd is following the sheep, what’s he good for? Why not just dress him up in white wool and have him bleat?

Councillor Brian Lawlor’s approach to governing

I used to believe that the solution to such meagre politicians was to get rid of them altogether, and switch to a purely participative form of democracy, in which the people make all the decisions themselves. But now I’m changing my mind. People don’t know what they want.
Take the palaver in Westminster that led to that above-mentioned overture from Teresa May. The politicians over there might be fighting like kids who have been given too much sugar, but according to a recent poll they in fact perfectly reflect the British electorate.
My old neighbours in Dublin 24 aren’t much better. They support helping the homeless, but they don’t want their local abandoned monastery to be used for this purpose. Asked to decide between the two, they would dither and pontificate like Jacob Rees-Mogg after a caffeine hit. How can we possibly expect them – or anybody – to make far-reaching national decisions? We’d might as well offer them 5 golden tickets for a night out in Medley, and watch them bitchfight over them on WhatsApp. It wouldn’t produce any solutions, but at least it’d be entertaining.
All the best, minister,
Simon

The Housing Crisis: On Donegal

A spate of tragedies in Donegal begs the question: What is the Irish government doing for this forgotten county?

Dear Minister,
How’s it going, Eoghan? My emails are getting to be like the 49 bus: you wait ages for one to come, and then two arrive at once. Not that it was much of a bother to you, I’m sure: at this stage, I doubt doubt my missives get even to the Spam folder. I was talking about this correspondence there at the weekend and people asked me if you had ever replied. “Not so much as a thank you please f**k off,” I reply. It seems rejected job candidates and failed actors rank higher on the list of those deserving social etiquette than I do.

Not that I’m bitter.

In any case, I couldn’t write for a vast tranche of the past . Having binge-watched The Ted Bundy Tapes and mixed some pills I definitely shouldn’t have mixed, I ended up writhing and jabbering in a basement somewhere off Gardner Street. I don’t know exactly how it happened, but I do remember random conversations with the residents – stringy, dead-eyed types – about the immutable nature of existence, the arbitrary edge of society and so on and so forth. Riveting stuff for me, but I don’t think they were too interested…

When I emerged back into the January daylight, the first thing I did was to grab the Irish Times from a newsagent on Dorset Street and see what I’d missed. I was clearly still a bit addled, because I couldn’t really get a handle on any story until I’d reached the Property section, which contained a bizarre story about houses in Sicily going for €1 each. This, of course, is the same publisher that earlier this month described a million-euro pricetag for a Dublin home as “modest”, so there was bound to be a catch. And indeed there was: each home in the Sicilian town of Sambuca would need a massive overhaul. So you’d probably end up paying hundreds of thousands to live in a town named after a drink which you would only consume under duress, or it was 4.30am and you’d drunk everything else in the cabinet. Well, it beats living in Donegal, I suppose…

And that’s the other thing I’ve noticed since my “lost weekend”: Donegal has been in the news a lot this month. Aside from a bunch of local racists trying to burn down a hotel earmarked for asylum seekers (more of which later), the stories seem to be about road accidents.
Worse still, the victims seem to be completely undeserving of their fate. First there was that young teacher who jumped in front of a 4×4 on a downhill roll to save the life of a child. Then, only last weekend, a car crash killed four young lads (“lovely lads”, as they’ve been described, “gentlemen”).
The overwhelming tragedy of these events is vastly exacerbated by the two kinds of people they killed: the generous and the young. Few of us can claim to be either. Most of us, upon our deaths, are destined for purgatory, if it exists – and which, if it does, I’d say consists of endless repetition – whatever was happening, say, at the moment of death. This in itself doesn’t sound terrible until you realise that anything becomes hellish on constant repeat. After a while, your mind disconnects from the sensory input and starts to try to figure out what’s going on and how the hell do I get out of here?

If you’ve ever travelled on a Donegal road, you might have a notion of how sadly inevitable these kinds of accidents are. And you should know, minister, because you were there yourself only a couple of weeks ago, doing another interminable grip-and-grin with local politicians at another interminable housing development.

Great to be in Donegal with @McHughJoeTD this morning.

Visiting new homes & sites today that together will house more than 300 people thanks to almost €23m from taxpayer. A small but important part of housing activity underway by @donegalcouncil pic.twitter.com/KaVTfImIHm

— Eoghan Murphy (@MurphyEoghan) January 11, 2019

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You’ve got to work on your PR, minister. Speaking as an avid follower, I’m getting a bit tired of all the photo ops at turf-turnings around the country. As I’ve said before, the micro events mean next to nothing to the hordes of people trying to get by. Much less to a county – Donegal – whose constituents have been consistently neglected by the national government.

Because if there’s one thing that Donegal and Sicily both have in common, it’s that civic abandonment. “bandit country” perception. This is partly the fault of geography. They’re both sticking out of their countries like an abscess, and as a result their often last on the government’s list of priorities. To make things worse, Donegal’s elected representatives demonstrate an absolute lack of leadership and political nous (just like my other antagonist of the week, Councillor Brian Lawlor). Local TD Charlie McConalogue opposed a disused hotel in Moville being used to house asylum seekers with the same “concerns” about property planning and zoning laws – just a couple of days before a couple of local thugs, in much the same mindset, attempted to burn the hotel to the ground.

Take a step back and you see how far Donegal is from the national view. Its income is the lowest in Ireland; its population has grown at a much slower rate than the rest of the country over the past 30 years or so; and although it is set to be more affected by Brexit than any other county, its name hardly passes the lips of any politician involved in the farrago.

It’s no wonder the roads are in such a state. I was once forced to walk the winding road between Muff and Moville at night – where there were no streetlights and yet locals drove like lunatics – and it near killed me. If a national politician ever drove on a road like this in, say, Offaly, en route to some event on the west coast, he or she might make note of it and try to fix the problem. But what politician ever travels as far as Donegal?

So the next time you tweet about Donegal, Minister, your message had better amount to more than just a photo op and a handshake. At the very most, you might actually be able to straighten out a road, or house a family, and thus save a life or two. That’s enough to take you to heaven.

All the best,
Simon

The Housing Crisis: On Debt

It’s January in Ireland’s housing crisis – a time when everyone’s backs should be against the wall. Yet swathes of Ireland seem to be in the full swing of a second Celtic Tiger. How can this be? Who is responsible and who, utimately, will pay the price?

Dear Minister,
How’s it going, Eoghan? Coming down after the Christmas splurge? I wouldn’t be surprised if you were out with the hordes of homeless squatting around Leinster House, holding a bowl out for alms. Things are tough this end too. M just applied for a credit card. Our backs are against the wall. I mean it’s January and I know everyone’s back should be against the wall. But M and I can’t seem to get off the back foot and actually save some money. And, as I look up from my baked-bean dinner, it looks like Ireland’s having a great time. I can’t reconcile the two.

Luckily, I guess, neither M nor I are in serious debt. I’m grateful that every penny I have is my own. Well, “my own” for about 5 nanoseconds every payday, before the bank’s servers kick in and deduct my rent and bills. Of course, that’s after my pension has come out, because what am I going to do when I retire? And taxes of course. Jesus, how does anyone survive in this country?

Yet people do, and they thrive. The 191-reg cars are already on the road; the overpriced G&Ts are flowing on Camden Street; and a house just went on the market for €950K described (tongue completely removed from cheek) as modest.

Walk-in ready Churchtown home exudes contemporary cool

Posted by The Irish Times on Thursday, 10 January 2019

This is it: we’re living in The Celtic Tiger Episode 2 (“Same Shit, Different Decade”), and no one has learned a goddam thing.

We’ve crunched the numbers before, and there’s no way the average Irish person can afford to splurge like this – not after they’ve paid for their extortionate living costs. They must be borrowing. In this second gilded age, what’s important seems to be, as the Italians say, fare una bella figura: that everyone give the impression they’re doing well, even if we’re all in hock to somebody else. We’re all starving beauty queens; we are 17-year-old boys with carefully-coiffed hair puffing out our chests to get into that over-21 nightclub. If the answer is debt, then we’re as pathetic and delusional as we were in the early 2000s, and we’ll fall just as hard as we did in the catastrophe that followed.

I was reading recently about the aftermath of that catastrophe when I came across a passage which got me thinking about debt. A Florida lawyer, speaking to a desperately insolvent (and desperately ill) client in the aftermath of the subprime loan crash, said: “The only thing that is even remotely possible is massive worldwide debt repudiation … It all gets fucking burned up, because, if not, your son works for his entire life and never accumulates anything, because he is busy paying off personal debt and government debt and institutional debt.” Well, that debt repudiation never came and a lot of what that lawyer prophesied is in the here and now. Is there a causal relationship? I don’t know, but in my quest to find out if everyone else is as messed up as I am financially, his prophecy does provide some answers.

Even governments – entire nations – seem to owe far more money than they actually have. This struck me just before Christmas when Macron – a politician who usually strikes me as a very astute man – addressed a nation of impoverished and angry yellow vests from behind a gilded desk. (It reminded me inevitably of Charlie Haughey’s infamous “tighten your belts” speech.) At the very time Macron was making this speech, he may have been thinking of his government’s running debt of over €2 trillion – equivalent to 97% of the national GDP. Almost every government around the world is running a debt in the billions or even trillions, yet performs its duties in the most ostentatious of surroundings.
This contradiction, of course, descends to the politicians like you who are running the government. The cost of (re)election is profound and well-documented. As we’ve seen, politicians in the UK run up five-figure sums to get a parliamentary seat, but this is dwarfed by the millions which US senators must pay. That’s why you never can completely trust a politician – whether they’re a Healy-Rae or an Ocasio-Cortez – not until you’ve seen their ledgers, and the kinds of names that appear in their lists of donors.

Ireland is doing a little better than France, but the country’s finances are still as ragged as an overused pair of knickers. We just owe 68% of our GDP compared to France’s 97% (though that’s still €233.2bn, or almost €47,000 per Irish person*. After the government’s net worth is deducted, it’s on the hook for €155bn. It’s enough to make your eyes water.)
That aside, it’s our household debt that we should really be worried about. Granted, it’s at its lowest since 2004, and the financial experts are spinning the fact that it’s down 10% since 2017. But it’s DTI you’ve got to look at. This is debt as a proportion of disposable income – or, “how much money you owe versus how much you have”, and the answer for Irish people is (drumroll please): 133%. In other words, the entirety of an average Irish person’s income is debt they have to pay off – plus another third that they don’t have. The Central Bank says that “Ireland’s DTI ratio remains the fourth highest” in the EU. This is worryingly similar to our comparative position in Europe 10 or 15 years ago in terms of housing prices, wouldn’t you say? Lately, the increase in the value of properties in Ireland has helped offset household debt, but the same the same Central Bank report shows a significant uptick in remortgaged loans since 2014.

I’m assuming that everyone else is in the same situation as me: working hard and unable to pay the bills. If that’s true, then, this is simply a fact of life – albeit the kind they really didn’t prepare us for in school. The French yellow jackets, though, are driven by some vague notion of a gilded few keeping the many in debt so as to pay for their own corrupt lifestyle.
I’ve said before that in Ireland the revolution will probably never come. Whether this is because there is, actually, no cabal above us to spark a revolution, or because there is a cabal but citizens are permanently drugged or distracted, I couldn’t tell you.
Here’s hoping the former is true, Minister, because if it’s not – if, in fact, the many of us are indebted to the few – then there’s going to be hell to pay, and in such situations the government is always first in the firing line. The US government shutdown is the most egregious example of an upper echelon of society engendering debt and destitution amongst poorer citizens: government workers are now facing an intractable situation with the family finances because their wages and their work are being used as political footballs.  

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To paraphrase national treasure BlindBoy Boatclub, debt is natural but excessive debt is to be avoided. A fair chunk of household debt in Ireland consists of mortgages: this is “natural” debt. (In fact, did you know the original meaning of mortgage is “an agreement unto death”? Look it up. It seems even Ye Olde English knew that there was no getting out of paying some fat baron for that roof over your head)  Keeping up with the Joneses, however – that’s unnatural debt. Now, it seems, overpriced drinks and new cars are driving us into the red, but how long before everyone starts buying two houses again? And when the bottom falls out like it did last time, will we take it lying down like 10 years ago or will there be pitchforks and torches waiting for you outside Leinster House?

All the best, Minister,
Simon

 

[Featured photo, altered, from Icons8 team via Unsplash]

The Housing Crisis: Letting Go

The author reflects on a Christmas crisis averted, and exactly at what point those caught up in Dublin’s housing crisis should let go of their anxiety.

Dear Minister,
How’s it going, Eoghan? How was Christmas? I have a mental picture of you, Colin and Cillian sitting at the table in Aylesbury with paper hats and a look of utter exhaustion and bemusement on your faces. Like, how the hell did we make it to the end of the year? What just happened? Or maybe all the bitterness from the year exploded in a Christmas barney with the brothers – because what Christmas is complete without some kind of family drama?

Me, I had 20lbs of food to cook, along with a father who demands the center of whatever room he’s in, to the detriment of his long-suffering relatives. The perfect recipe for a storm and, were it not for the fact that I had popped 5mg of Xanax (procured from a contact in south-east Asia who owed me a favour), it looked like my Christmas Day looked was headed for a cliff edge. As things went, though, I was pretty blissed out, and managed just fine…

https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/2X485T9Z5Ly0xyaghN73ed

Anyone who knows me well will tell you that I’m a man who needs to calm down a little. Always have been. Since I was a teenager, I’ve been bemusing friends and loved ones with the kinds of questions nobody can answer. Why am I here? Why are any of us here? Why does evil exist and, since it does, why be a good person?
Anytime someone gave me an answer it would just lead to more questions. Even a philosophy degree didn’t do the trick – so I suppose this is my fault more than anyone else’s.
I’m now at a stage where I haven’t reached any conclusions except to be a good person, work in a job where I’m not screwing anyone over, pay my taxes and not be in debt to anyone. Maybe some questions can’t be answered, but sometimes you’ve got to let them go, to get on with your life.

Most of us get through life just fine without these concerns. For others, there’s Xanax.

I remember the first time I did Xanax. It was about ten years ago, as I was leaving the city in Asia where I’d been living for over 2 years. It couldn’t have come at a more potent time. After a lifetime of freaking myself and others out, I had decamped to a new career in Asia, where I learned about hard work, studied Buddhism and started letting go. Letting go of my hang-ups and stresses; learning to concentrate on the things I could and wanted to control. The beginning of my long journey back to Ireland was an apogee: as the drug kicked in, I lay back in my seat on the bus and watched the streets and industrial parks flash by before the motorway slip-road. I didn’t know if I would see them again, and I didn’t really mind. That’s the great thing about opioids: you could be in the middle of an apocalyptic battle and with one blue pill you’re lost to all the madness that surrounds you.

I had a similar moment some weeks ago, but without any chemical inducements. I had been stressing out about money – specifically, my savings, which were dwindling and, in doing so, giving me the distinct impression that I was getting nowhere in life. I talked to my mother about it and, after venting my frustrations, she quietly replied: “Just forget about saving.” I looked at her blankly. She went on: “It sounds like things are getting too difficult to manage so, for now, at least, just go with the flow – don’t worry about your savings until things become more manageable.” A huge weight lifted off my shoulders. Of course! I realised, It’s not the end of the world if I have to take the foot off the pedal for a while. I saw that my savings were becoming a fulcrum for my anxieties about the future, and my place in life. The dwindling  It wasn’t

Sadly, this feeling was not to last forever. As Christmas approached, the savings dwindled even further and I started to think, Maybe I should be worried about this. What happens if we have an emergency? When will we ever be secure in a home? And will I ever be able to figure out why I’m doing everything right but still can’t get off the back foot?
There are thousands of people who think like me all around the country, living in almost every strata of society, from the bottom to…well, around the upper-middle. They’re pissed because they’re hard-working people who can’t catch a break. They’re so pissed that there’s very little that you, Minister, or anyone else can do which doesn’t feel like a pat on the arm from a condescending parent, or that rich friend whose parents bought them a 4-bed house near the city center: Don’t worry about it – everything will be ok in the end. No, I want it to be ok NOW. I work hard, goddammit, and I deserve some security.

And this is where the Xanax philosophy of “letting go” veers straight into a brick wall. For all the thousands of people around the country who feel cheated, there are millions who have been cheated – especially in the midst of the crash ten years ago, when they lost their homes, pensions, jobs and even families because of some Wall Street Ponzi scheme. At the same time, along came opioids like Xanax and the die was cast. We now know the path that Xanax leads to, and the reason it’s widely (and rightly) banned. We know that, although it was supposed to be a pain reliever, it eventually became America’s perfect barbiturate. And millions used it to let go of their very real problems, until the only problem that was left was what to do when the drug ran out.

A couple of days before Christmas, M took me to see the Mary Poppins sequel. She’s loved the original since she was a kid and she figured a little Disney magic would make the holiday season even nicer. She was right: the movie was charming and full of magic – to a point.

Towards the end of the movie, the main characters find themselves staring a crisis in the face. The kids are about to lose their home because of a battle in the bank which they will never be able to wrap their little heads around – all they know is that if they don’t do something, and do it quickly, they’ll be out on their arses before you can say “chim-chimeroo”. No sooner do they start getting a plan together than they are whisked away into a song-and-dance routine about lighting lamps around London.

 

What? I was suddenly seething. What the hell had this to do with the story? And what freaking good was Mary Poppins trying to achieve for these kids before they became waifs and strays?

I got so pissed off because they were being bamboozled. Whether it’s the characters or the writers themselves, someone was telling these kids – and, by proxy, the audience – “Hey, if you’re up against a massive crisis created by even bigger, more arbitrary forces – just forget about it and sing.” Nothing about how to deal with a crisis – even better, how to resolve it – and ultimately get past it. What would have been much better – or at least a decent compromise – would have been to sing about the crisis at hand, and at least acknowledge it.

Because this, I suppose, is the only way to let go: to admit that your back’s against the wall, but laugh regardless. Dance if you’re weighed down with balls and chains. Sing while the taxman is removing his pound of flesh from your side. But you must always acknowledge the crisis at hand – that is the key in revelling in its absurdity.(Or, to put it in more practical terms: you’re never going to be able to afford a deposit for a mortgage – not for the next few years at least – so enjoy your life; eat that avocado toast; take that holiday. This must be what my mother meant.)

If the writers of Mary Poppins were looking for a little more honesty and depth, they could do no better than getting a songwriter like Father John Misty in. The man is an unkempt reprobate who is rarely sober, but man does he know how to write about love in the aftermath of chaos. He would have come out with a song which would have both regaled the kids and given them a few life lessons about coping with loss. God knows he’s done it before:

As death fills the streets we’re garden-variety oblivious;
You grab my hand and say in a told-you-so-voice: “It’s just how we expected.”

Everything is doomed, and nothing will be spared,
But I love you honeybear.

All the best, Minister,
Simon

The Housing Crisis: On Cognitive Dissonance

Migration is in the news and a dark corner of the internet goes wild over the popular belief that we can both help refugees and address our own housing crisis. Are we guilty of a contradiction?

Dear Minister,
How’s it going, Eoghan? Jaysis, is it Christmas yet? Is it just me or does everything get ramped up just before you take your winter leave – as if some hidden hand is wringing the last out of you before it has to let you go for 2 weeks? Myself and M are run ragged and counting down the days til we get a holiday, in a place I won’t name, for fear of sounding (again) like a yuppie. Suffice to say, there’ll be more wine than I can shake a vine at, and hopefully enough time to catch up on my writing and this bastarding carousel of world news. How do you keep up with it? I mean, things are moving faster than I can get a grip on them. I just do it for laughs, but it’s your bloody job!

I thought you might be able to get away from it all and head to Marrakesh, but instead Leo has kept you at home for photo ops in Cherrywood, while Justice Minister Charlie Flanagan is enjoying some political backslapping in unseasonably warm weather. I don’t know much about Flanagan but jesus…by all accounts he seems an insufferable bore. His Twitter feed is as banal as a pint of Peroni in Temple Bar. But what do you expect from a middle-aged career politician from the midlands? And what has he said to put such a pained grin on Mary Robinson’s face?

Minister @CharlieFlanagan with Rwandan Minister for Foreign Affairs & International Cooperation, Dr Richard Sezibera & the UNSG’s Special Envoy for Climate Change, Mary Robinson at the @UNmigration conference in Marrakech pic.twitter.com/Ctx3CcAAuE

— Department of Justice & Equality (@DeptJusticeIRL) December 10, 2018

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Funny how we’re talking about travelling to mainland Europe and northern Africa, when apparently all anyone is talking about (when they’re not obsessing over Brexit) is migration. Let’s not forget the reason Flanagan was in Marrakesh in the first place: to sign, on Ireland’s behalf, the UN Global Compact for Migration. I suppose it makes sense that such a far-reaching international treaty should be signed by the justice minister, rather than the minister for housing. On second thoughts, though, it wouldn’t be so strange for you to be there. After all, migration must be a huge part of your remit. It certainly puts you in a tight bind: on the one hand, you have a crippling housing shortage to deal with and, on the other hand, new people coming in, looking for a home. What to do with this contradiction?

One particular dilettante of Twitter has latched onto the dilemma and run with it. Let me introduce you to Gemma O’Doherty.
On the surface, O’Doherty looks like a respectable journalist. She has an impressive-looking portfolio of investigative credentials, a healthy disdain for established authority, and a more-than-decent following on social media. (She’s caught the attention of Roisin Ingle, Niamh Randall and Rory Hearne – not inconsequential figures in the national discourse, especially when it comes to the housing crisis.)
But spend a moment going through her tweets – or, like me, hours poring over her videos and rants – and you see she’s a crackpot with ideas ranging from the farcical to the dangerous. She has this madcap theory on how the transgender community is conspiring to brainwash our children through unicorn symbolism. It has to be seen to be believed…

Copious supplies of ‘gender neutral’ unicorns on sale in ⁦@avocaireland⁩, now sadly owned by ⁦US global @Aramark⁩. The symbol of transgenderism is being rammed down children’s throats at every turn. It’s time Irish parents took a stand and took their custom elsewhere pic.twitter.com/2E98h3r7xT

— Gemma O’Doherty (@gemmaod1) December 18, 2018

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Sadly, though, she has a fairly prolific online presence as a Putin-lovin’, George Soros-hatin’ Irexit supporter and anti-vaccer. Her followers talk of Zionist conspiracies; she follows the kind of people who are most likely flag-wavign belivers in QAnon and Pizzagate; and she gleefully re-tweets the “mainstream media’s” reports of her association with alt-right social media networks. She opposes the Marrakech agreement, and in doing so lines up beside such luminaries as Donald Trump (who pulled the USA out of the agreement last December), Viktor Orban (who pulled Hungary out of it seven months later) and Marine Le Pen (who…ummm…held a half-attended press conference on the day it happened).

But O’Doherty suffers from the same problem all idealogues ultimately do, and that is contradiction. She opposes internationalism, yet a great deal of her support comes from abroad. She talks about free speech, yet slaps down anyone who disagrees with her.  Although I can see through most of her rants, I still can’t get my arms around this. How does this woman even operate in the morning without her head pulling in two different directions at once?
These anti-immigration cranks will claim to be the clear-minded ones – oases of truth in a sea of corruption and internationalism. When in the ascendant (at Trump rallies, in the run-up to Brexit) they move with assurance and swagger. They feel as if a few tweaks to policy and industry will rid the country of those pesky foreigners, and that all the countries’ ills will follow them too. They wilt, though, as soon as you show them the figures: that their jobs are being swallowed up by automation – not Mexicans or Poles – and that whole industries rely on foreign labour because no one else will do them. Or as Chuck Palahniuk put it…

One thing I have to credit you for, minister – you, and Fine Gael, and any centrist political creed – is your ability to be flexible. A cynic would see this as bourgeois opportunism – but I call it moral room to manoeuvre. Operating in the middle means you’re not tied to either extreme, and you can make some of the people happy without, obviously, making all of the people happy. It’s a safe bet; a middling approach that will get you no friends in some quarters, but means that most people can find you merely inoffensive at worst. Like a Peroni in Temple Bar.

Nevertheless, there is one contradiction which O’Doherty is completely spot-on in pointing out, which is the opposing views over housing and migration. Anyone who is suffering in this housing crisis should, by all rights, be opposed to increased migration as a threat to their own chances of getting a home. Yet this doesn’t seem to be the case in Ireland, where most people seem to shun O’Doherty and her lot when they decry the UN Migration Pact as “treacherous”.

What you and I and O’Doherty all seem to suffer from is cognitive dissonance – or, the ability to hold two opposing ideas in your mind without going mad. Depending on who you’re talking to, it is either a mental disability or a sign of intelligence.
As a disability it’s everywhere you look. It’s here that we can squarely fit O’Doherty and her crew, right between Women for Trump (a contradiction if ever I heard one) and British car factory workers who voted to leave the EU. But should we all be in there too, suffering from a delusion that we can both welcome migrants into our country and have enough suitable housing for everyone?
F Scott Fitzgerald sees it differently. “The test of a first-rate intelligence,” he wrote in 1936, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” I’d like to think that most of Ireland is guilty of this kind of dissonance. After all, we have no populist parties to speak of, and we seem to have escaped the bitterness that divides the US, the UK, and most of the EU. We are at our heart a welcoming country, an attitude which inoculates us against the anti-immigrant strain which is corroding societies worldwide.
We pull off this balancing act in that “moral ground to maneouvre”. Morality is chaos: it allows for all kinds of contradictions in one’s views, as long as one is a good person. The amoral worldview makes perfect sense: available homes are measured up against incoming migrants, and a position is coldly taken. But this approach is a shortcut from thinking; it holds easy answers above the right ones; it is insular; and it allows no room for the nuance which makes the world what it is.

Merry Christmas to you and yours, Minister, and watch out for the Scrooges.

All the best,
Simon

The Housing Crisis: Yellow Reg!

Having avoided Brexit entirely so far, we are compelled to talk about it by the growth of a strange phenomenon on the streets of Dublin.

Dear Eoghan,
How’s it going? I’m writing this in a building owned by the Chinese government, so I have to be careful what I say. It’s on the edge of the UCD campus, on a windy periphery, populated mainly by ducks and (every Thursday) food trucks. The building is sleek, completely furnished and still redolent of fresh paint and new carpet.
But here’s the thing: it’s always empty. It’s been open since the summer, but I haven’t seen a single class held here; there are few events; and its staff seems to exceed no more than 2 interns sitting at a makeshift desk near the front door.
As you know, minister, I’m not given to conspiracy theories, but I am starting to get the heebie-jeebies whenever I approach the building. Once I’m in class, I’m fully aware of the possibility that I’m being watched and heard. A sterile hum drones away in the background and it’s starting to drive me mental. Is it a server, monitoring and sending all of my activities back to Beijing? And what of those silent hidden cameras? Those embedded microphones?
This building seems to have no purpose, no banal explanation which would explain its existence. And this absence of explanation drives the weak mind to imagine all kinds of conspiracies.

Anyway, enough of Occam’s Razor; it gets us nowhere anyway. Instead, let’s delve into the murky Baader-Meinhof phenomenon – or the belief that something, once noticed, beings appearing everywhere you turn.

M and I have revived the ancient Irish tradition of punching each other on the arm whenever we see a yellow registration plate on a car. Childish I know, but it’s one of those little in-jokes that couples like us have, and it punctuates (literally) the various trips we take around the country in the car. We started doing it about a year ago and since then, I’ve been seeing yellow reg plates everywhere. Is this just a figment of my imagination, or are there more British-registered vehicles on the road of the Republic than ever before?
I remember your predecessors in government clamping down on this kind of stuff (pun intended), taxing to the hilt Brits who had their cars in the country for more than 12 months. Has this changed?  Or has nothing changed except that another small chunk of my sanity is crumbling away? Maybe I’m destined for a padded cell and a strait jacket, mumblings about the lizard people driving British cars. And anyway, what on earth does any of this have to do with the housing crisis in Dublin?

I went down to the Central Statistics Office to get to the bottom of it and they laughed me out of the building. A receptionist at the front desk smiled condescendingly at me, pushed a button under her desk, and said they had more important questions to answer, like how many British people had been refused an Irish passport since 2016. “I’m a goddam taxpayer,” I grunted as two security guards pinned my arms behind me, “I have a right to know!” Then they were dragging me out the door and I screamed, “Are we being invaded?! Does this go all the way to the top?! Get me Earl Warren now! I want Warren I tell you!”

Anyway, suffice to say I soon realised that the CSO wouldn’t be welcoming me back, so I started to investigate this myself. I looked for patterns, and I noticed clusters of yellow registration plates around three specific areas: building sites, storage units, and motorways. The last we can just put down to the law of averages: if more cars are arrayed together in one place, of course you’re going to see more yellow reg plates (or maroon Volvos, or whatever else you’re looking for). So let’s discount this. But the other two areas were very interesting…

Now, as I’ve said, conspiracy theories are not my thing. With that said, I hope you’ll forgive me if I sound like a crank for the next few hundred words…Because when it comes to the yellow reg plates, I can only conlcude that one of two things is happening:

1. That UK businesses are offering a much-needed service, filling a niche for foreign labour in the construction industry. The Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) recently announced that there aren’t enough construction workers to fill the Celtic Tiger-era number of jobs needed to build new housing in Ireland. If the man on the street is to be believed, this is because all the Irish carpenters and sparkies buggered off to the Antipodes when work dried up here in the recession 10 years ago.
   This explanation – that British workers are coming over in their yellow-reg vehicles to help us get back on our feet – seemed to me fairly benign, til I saw the Irish Times describe the shortage as such: “Ireland will need an influx of foreign workers to meet the State’s housing targets, the ESRI has said.” The State’s housing targets. Do I see your hand in this, minister? Have you invited our old overlords over under naive pretences, like soldiers in a Trojan horse? Which leads us to a second, more ominous, theory…
2. That the Brits really are taking over, looking for an offshore residence in the storm of Brexit. Now, in all my letters to you, I have succeeded so far in avoiding the elephant-in-the-room that is Brexit, but it was inevitably going to come up. In Britain itself, hiding one’s wealth in property has practically replaced polo as the pastime of the upper classes. A whole system consisting of loopholes and whisper listings results in homes being sold for prices of up to £50m with very little public accountancy – a practice which the head of the National Crime Agency has credited with helping to push up property prices in London.

   If this practice has been imported here to Ireland, it would explain why we’re seeing yellow-reg cars gathered around storage units and upmarket housing development. (Case in point: look for any renovation going on in Dublin 4 and you’ll see yellow reg vehicles gathered around it like worker bees around a hive.) As Brexit lurches towards its victims, they would do well to stockpile their valuables abroad. When the shit really hits the fan in a No-Deal Scenario, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs are going to come and take anything that isn’t nailed down.

After all this, then, I’m not much closer to an answer to my question – or at least without sounding like a mad Sinn Fein conspiracy theorist. I’m sure there’s a simple explanation to all of the yellow reg plates which M and I are seeing everywhere but, in the absence of any explanation the mind runs wild.

One thing we can be certain of, though, is this: if many more of them come, Ireland won’t be able to handle them. Just after the Brexit result broke, local Dublin councillors began looking at the city’s readiness to take any businesses who might be relocating from the UK, and their findings did not bode well. Two years later, in typical Irish fashion, we’ve gotten no closer to being able to provide transport, infrastructure and accommodation to cater for the companies and their employees who might be fleeing the Brexit bombshell. The writer John Harris reported in a recent dispatch from Dublin’s housing crisis to the Guardian that, “As Brexit grinds on, there are fears that if companies relocate from the UK to Ireland, it will only add to Dublin’s housing problems.”

30,000 empty homes and nowhere to live: inside Dublin’s housing crisis https://t.co/KdMZ3W22bE

— The Guardian (@guardian) November 29, 2018

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These yellow registration plates might clog up our roads, but that will be the least of our problems. The greatest irony of the ESRI report is that Dublin can’t have too many migrant workers to help solve the housing crisis, because the workers will have nowhere to live. If and when they do come, and no matter where they come from, one thing is clear: we’ll be about as ready for them as we were for the Viking hoards a thousand years ago. Their arrival will drive demand (and thus rents) up even further.

Just when you think this shitshow of a housing crisis can’t get more tragically comic, the Brits come over like they’ve always done, to show us how things are really done.

All the best, minister,
Simon

The Housing Crisis: Not Money, But Opportunity

As Ireland’s housing crisis lurches on, Minister for Housing Eoghan Murphy says his party wants to take Ireland forward. Which begs the question, “Ummmm….where?”

Dear Eoghan,
How’s it going? I have to say, I was more than a little disappointed that I didn’t see any invitation to the Fine Gael Ard Fheis in the postbox. Have we not built up a rapport, Eoghan, if not a friendship? I thought, as one of your constituents and regular correspondents, I would be in with a chance, no?
Ah, I’m just yanking your chain. Of course I wasn’t getting into that conference. You were hardly going to put up with me heckling you in the middle of your speech, or shouting at Leo while he was touting his new, watery plan for Ireland. Not that I would’ve bothered. In reality I would probably have been propping up the hotel bar, harassing the party glitterati. An equally grim prospect.
Instead, I watched the whole conference – including your speech – on social media and news websites, like a schmuck. I noted your lilts and gestures as you spoke to a drafty hall in CityWest. The acoustics must’ve been terrible, because I kept hearing an awful echo throughout your speech, your voice bouncing off the walls and around the crowd before coming back to you, with nothing substantive or new to say.

It was a decent speech, in fairness; you came across as sympathetic – especially to people who are working hard, but whose rent or mortgage is “pinning them to their collar”. (Nice analogy there). It was hardly oratorical magic, but if I wanted rabble-rousing I would go to the People-Before-Profit conference. (Wait, do they even have one?). No political speech, of course, can have much substance. Listening to a contemporary politician speak is as banal as drinking alcohol-free beer or decaffeinated coffee – and I have never really understood either. What’s the point? You want substance but all you get is froth and a bad aftertaste.

Equally banal was the name of the conference: Taking Ireland Forward Together. Forward, eh? Where are we going? You guys are in charge of this ship, so…ummm, where are you steering us to? Or, at the very least, how do you know we’ve moved forward? How do you measure it?

Leo’s answer seems to be something to do with money. His speech – just as stilted and sympathetic as yours – was met with unearned applause, especially when he announced the tax break he wants to give to the middle class. Pushing the tax limit from €34,550 to €35,300 – well, it’s hardly the stuff of revolutions.

And giving more disposable income to people – especially middle-class people – is far from the way “forward”. Leo’s new policy is a sign that he still blindly believes in the trickle-down effect, which so many economists have, by now, rubbished. Or maybe it’s the trickle-up effect he believes in: that somehow more yuppies with more money means more tax revenue. As such, the policy lies somewhere between Trump’s tax break and Matteo Salvini’s basic income. Like alcohol-free beer and a decaff mocha, you can’t trust either.
Think of it: have you seen what we yuppies buy when we have more money? Avocado toast, electronic scooters and a second TV on sale during Black Friday. (Hey, shrug most of the economists, it brings in revenue, don’t it?) Black Friday, in fact, is the perfect demonstration of how stupid people are when they have money to spend…

The smart bourgeoisie will avoid the sales and the avocado toast, and invest their extra money in services. They will hire accountants, who will help them avoid paying any more tax. This is the smart move and frankly this is what we need: not money, but the opportunities money brings. Leo’s watchword of the day was “fairness”, but the country will never be fair as long as most people are paying tax while others are avoiding it because they can afford an accountant to help them dodge it. So forget about an eight-hundred-euro bump in the tax bracket: nationalise the entire accountancy industry so everyone can get a tax break!

Or, to take a less dramatic gesture (because I know that, if nothing else, Fine Gael abhors dramatic gestures), instead of giving more cash to people, simply give them a break from the mundane tasks of life so they can concentrate on improving themselves and the lot of Irish life.
Let’s call it “service credits”. Single mother? Go get a part-time cleaner to alleviate your chores. Struggling renter? Find a fiduciary advisor, to help you invest and maximise the little money you have. Sole trader? Hire a marketing consultant to help you meet your goals. This one is on us, the government. Now go out and do what drives you; improve yourself; educate others, and actually drive this country forward.

You and Leo might measure the success of your policy by how much money you’ve made or saved. Great societies, though, aren’t remembered for their balance sheets, but for their contribution to the world writ large. And this comes down to division of labour. You can’t write a great novel or create a world-changing invention if you’ve got laundry to do, or the toilet’s backed up. Likewise, you can’t have a society of innovation when everyone except the elite is worrying about paying the rent.

Cuneiform: or “Mesopotamiam Ogham”

Take cuneiform as an example. This is the earliest form of human writing; it’s 6000 years old, and (you’re gonna love this) it describes tax revenue. The people who created it – the Mesopotamians in present-day Iraq – were just as obsessed with revenue, then, as you and Leo. But forget about what it says, and think of how it was made. The people who developed the technology needed to write, and to actually begin writing – they couldn’t have done this unless someone else was growing their food for them (and taking care of their kids). This division of labour reflects a society of security for all, and privilege for (at least) some, who could rise above the menial, everyday tasks of life and create something that would survive beyond them.

So what’s Ireland’s contribution to the world going to be? An eight-hundred-euro bump in the upper tax bracket does next to nothing to answer this question. It’s pretty clear from Fine Gael’s obsession with tax breaks and short-term fixes that your vision of Ireland moving “forward” is fairly myopic. You and Leo would do well to either do something substantive (and, yes, dramatic) or go back to the balance sheet and stop pretending you’re Making Ireland Great Again.
I’ll get your decaff mocha-latte.

All the best, minister,
Simon

Democracy in Ireland (A RadioLab Rebuttal)

TO: Simon Adler (Radiolab)
CC: Yascha Mounk (Harvard University); Abie Philbin Bowman (RTE); Maureen O’Sullivan, Eoghan Murphy (Dáil Éireann)

Dear Mr. Adler,
As an avid fan of RadioLab, I was intrigued by your most recent episode, Tweak the Vote. In addition to being a fan, I am also an Irishman, a political blogger, and a sometime sports fan – all of which will be important later.
Listening to the preamble to this latest episode, my ears pricked up when I heard that, in assessing new approaches to democracy, you would be visiting Ireland. The brief flutter in my heart this provoked is pretty common over here: we Irish were raised in almost religious reverence to all things American, and we always feel a warm kind of honour when someone from the States expresses an interest in our country.

https://www.wnyc.org/widgets/ondemand_player/wnycstudios/#file=/audio/json/893784/&share=1

It was high praise that, questioning the bedrock of your own democracy, you would turn to us for inspiration. But while there’s a lot to be said for how we do things over here (vis-à-vis the proportional representation system which you did much to explain), I feel sadly obliged to point out a fatal flaw in the program.

Let’s tackle the first issue head-on: populism. Ireland is no home to demagogues; it never has been, and arguably the PR system is to thank for this. You wouldn’t really associate populism with Ireland, nor the few other countries (Malta, Australia, New Zealand) where PR is used on a national basis.
However, that’s not to say that populism couldn’t catch on here. Recently we had a presidential election where a wealthy entrepreneur named Peter Casey got 21% of the vote after he railed against a minority community and the establishment politicians. This is where my ears pricked up for the second time, when Yascha Mounk described his parents and grandparents being driven out by pogroms in eastern Europe, and described the fearful idea that “a political system which seemed relatively peaceful [and] stable might suddenly turn fractious and even violent.” Casey is no Trump, but Ireland still can’t be complacent. So why, with our enlightened electoral system, are we still threatened by demagogues who want to use democracy to dismantle it?

The problem, in short, is not with how our representatives are elected to government, but what they do when they get there.

 

My only objection to the programme is, sadly, a fundamental one: by focusing on the election, the programme treated politics as a sport, and thereby failed to address the problem it set out to solve. The hour-by-hour coverage of the Dublin Central election was closer to a narrative of a horse-race (replete with Kentucky derby sound effects) than an analysis. It makes better radio, I suppose. But this pitfall, which politicos from Hunter S Thompson to thefivethirtyeight gladly fall into, diverts us from the issues which cause disillusionment with democracy.

If we are going to talk about sports, and if we are to elevate Ireland above all the world’s nations, talk about hurling. It is the fastest sport on grass; it is thrilling, immersive, graceful game. There is no exceptionalism; a team’s success can only be measured by how skilfully it navigates a ball through the melee of the game, and different teams tend to win each year. There is no hooliganism, either; only the controlled violence on the pitch. Above all, though, hurling is like any other sport: it is entertainment and has very little bearing on Irish society. When a match is over we all must return to normal life, to tax returns and ever-present inequality.

via Pinterest

If we are to try to solve the problem at the heart of democracy – Irish or otherwise – we must focus on the much more boring subject of what politicians do after they’re elected. The cut-and-thrust of an election couldn’t be further from life in government than a hurling game is to a tax return. The life of a politician – rather than a candidate – involves bills that take months to pass, and a bureaucracy that would test the patience of a saint. That they negotiate these vicissitudes is remarkable, but they systematically fail to do their actual job, which is to help people deal with the meat-and-potatoes of life. This systematic failure is the real root of our modern disillusionment.

Think of a fundamental issue like housing. My ears pricked up for the third time when Mr. Mounk described the “shocking” finding from the World Values Survey that living in a democracy is important to less than one-third of Americans born since 1980. I shrugged – makes sense, I thought. What were the other options? Decent healthcare? A steady income? Two-thirds of Americans aged over 65 believe democracy is essential because generally speaking they are less concerned with these issues than are the younger voters, who don’t have baby-boom policies like Medicare and pension schemes to carry them.

In Ireland, the young and the old are defined by a different standard. The country is currently in the midst of a housing crisis which has landed like a hammer on these people born since 1980. For the first time in eighty years, rent is so high and a mortgage so unattainable that the idea of owning a home is as visible and distant as a star in the night sky. The government, elected by proportional representation, has been singularly unable to address the problem. This impotence has created a febrile atmosphere where frustration borders on fury. Asked to choose between living in a steady home or a functioning democracy, the millenials of Ireland could be forgiven for hesitating.

Democracy is undoubtedly the best form of government on offer. Or, to quote a more cynical Winston Churchill, “the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried.” Mr. Krulwich is right to say that it needs constantly to be fixed. But tweaking the election is not the way to do this; instead we must level the same amount of scrutiny on holding our politicians accountable for their every move. Rather than pivoting their policies to the next election cycle, or to a small set of bureaucratic stakeholders, they must prove their mettle by effecting real change for the people they represent. The the fault, dear Robert, lies not in our process, but in our politicians.

Kind regards,
Simon

The Housing Crisis: If You’re Going to San Francisco

Compared to San Francisco, Dublin has a stale economy, middling education – and a crippling housing crisis. Which begs the question: why is it such an expensive city?

Dear Minister,
How’s it going, Eoghan? I don’t know about you but, since the clocks went back, I’ve seen a malaise descend over everyone. This darkness is certainly getting me down. At night, I can’t tell what time it is; in the morning, I can’t be sure that it’s not night. Hammered ceaselessly by the cold rain, or trapped under an oppressive grey sky, it’s all I can do to keep my sanity in check. The only way I know how is to keep my head down and dream of sunnier places.
But I finally lost it when Ryan Tubridy nearly killed me on his e-scooter. I was half-lost in one of my reveries as I was crossing the Stillorgan dual carriageway – so, even though I was crossing at a traffic light, I really should have been more alert. That road is a deathtrap for any pedestrian exercising their right to walk. But even the most alert of road users could have been killed by that lunatic Tubridy with the speed at which he shot across my path, en route to some exercise in mediocrity at RTE. He was dressed to the hilt in safety gear: he had a helmet on, and a high-vis jacket studded with lights. As if all this gear meant he could go whatever speed he wanted. As if his mediocre contribution to Irish culture meant he transcended the rules of the road.

Tubridy you hack! I shouted after him. If you’re gonna kill me, at least do it on 4 wheels!

But he was gone. I strained my hands into claws, raised them above my head and let out one long howl at the charcoal sky. By this time the lights had changed and car horns were blaring at me to move. But I was oblivious. I had been daydreaming about flying to sunny San Francisco and that slimy so-called “journalist” had jolted me back to my real life in Dublin.

There are cities which, simply by being named, invoke exotic imagery. When I hear “San Francisco”, I think of an old Grateful Dead poster I saw years ago. Two eponymous skeletons sit overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, and beyond is a city of hills and buildings lit up like a summertime Christmas tree. San Fran is the site of so many cultural and political epochs: think flower power, Jefferson Airplane and Harvey Milk. Even after the hangover of the 70s had passed, the city was revitalised with the dawn of new tech, and became synonymous again with new and revolutionary thought.

By Source, Fair use, Link
Granted, these days it’s not easy to live there (which puts paid to any notions M and I might have of living there). People are fleeing county area in droves, as the city’s cost of living pushes it up to 28th in global rankings. In these same rankings, Dublin is not far behind, at 32nd. Which begs the question: what justifies the high cost of living here?
Dublin, obviously, is nowhere near San Fran for a multitude of reasons, mainly historical. But we don’t do ourselves any favours.

Let’s start with the economy. San Fran is the hub of one of the world’s top 20 economies. The city has had its ups and downs, but since Hewlett and Packard set up shop in a tiny garage there 80 years ago, it’s been synonymous with innovation. These days, Facebook, Google and hundreds of “unicorns” call the Valley their home and, with so much money flowing through the place, it’s no surprise that living there is 62% more expensive than anywhere else in the country.
Dublin, on the other hand, has been less a place of domestic innovation than a tributary for these innovators’ fortunes. The IDP was set up to attract foreign investment; a good job during the Celtic Tiger years consisted of assembling microchips in the Intel factory. Arguably the only economic innovation Ireland has made is the 12.5% corporate tax rate which reinvented Ireland as a tax haven for San Francisco’s tech giants. (I used to think these companies were the reason rent prices were skyrocketing in the city: with all these well-paid yuppies looking for a home, what would be left for everyone else? Google Docks is still an excellent example of this: it’s virtually impossible to find a home in the Grand Canal Basin without waving a pay slip from Google, emblazoned with some astronomical net salary.)
Ireland has never been a ‘tech hub’, then, but a tax haven, where homegrown innovation is so low down on the priority list it may as well be small print. Even innovators like the Collision brothers (founders of Stripe) have flown to California to find their success. Dublin, a city of educated English speakers, hasn’t even got the infrastructural capacity to attract all those companies cast off by the rupture of Brexit. They’d rather be in Paris. Where no one speaks English.

What of this education? Academics flock to San Fran, to such prestigious institutions as Stanford and Berkeley. To describe Dublin’s universities as middling would be generous: we’re in the 19th position on the Universitas21 worldwide ranking system, where the USA is number 1. (Ireland’s ranking is apparently not due to government investment in education, but in spite of its absence. But that’s another story.) Of our universities, TCD is ranked 104th, UCD is ranked 193rd and DCU is 422nd. Compare this with Stanford and Berkeley (2nd and 27th respectively).
This is not to say that Ireland does not have a fine tradition and respect for education, especially higher education. For decades, though, the best of Ireland’s graduates have largely fled the country after taking advantage of its education system. With no meaningful jobs on offer, and little in the way of innovation, why would they stay? And why pay for the honour?

Joyce: Ireland’s finest exile

I could go on about culture in Dublin and, the way things are going so far, you might think that I’m about to dismiss the entire Irish canon in one fell swoop. I’m not. Joyce and U2 are enough to put us in decent standing among the nations. (I don’t count Oscar Wilde; outside of Dublin, his roots in this city are so much forgotten that he might as well have been attributed the line spoken by another Dublin-born Brit, Wellington: “being born in a stable doesn’t make you a horse.” This opinion has gotten me into a lot of hot water with Dublin’s upper crust.)
But Joyce had to get out of Dublin before he could write about the city (and even then he didn’t do a very favourable job), and we’ve hardly produced any revolutionary music since U2 (except maybe Kevin Shields – who, yes, had to leave Dublin to make his name).
Stand Dublin up against San Fran – or any other centers of glamour and art – and it’s hard to ascribe the astronomical prices to the city’s haute couture. Perhaps this is because our present-day artists are being quite publicly forced out of the city by the cost of living which, after 1,000 words, I still can’t account for.

You want to know my theory? We just don’t have our act together. We never have. I’ve lived in Singapore, Seoul and London – hyper-organised cities where getting drunk and telling a spurious joke is likely to be met with anything from an incomprehensible frown (London) to a night in a prison cell (Singapore). Returning home to Dublin has been like stepping into a warm bath. Here, we’re incredibly relaxed and friendly. On the other hand, we don’t have the cop-on to construct vast metro systems, build economic powerhouses – or even, fortheloveofgod, make life affordable for ourselves. Our government is symptomatic of this. During the economic heyday, it was polluted with bungs and bad decisions, and these days “it’s argued we have higher taxes without the matching public services.”

via The Irish Times

The fault, dear minister, lies not in our stars but in ourselves. Blaming the government for our own losses is a shortcut to thinking. It prevents us from looking at ourselves; how we organise our own affairs; how we look after each other; and how we react to the poor services we are provided with. We need to start with this self-reflection, and stop kidding ourselves (for now, at least) that Dublin is a great city to live in.

All the best, Minister,
Simon

The Housing Crisis: Undercover Minister

The blog moves from problems in the Housing Crisis to solutions – no matter how ridiculous they might seem. 

Dear Minister,
How’s it going, Eoghan? As I write, in the last days of October, we are entering a week of terror and visages, where nothing is as it seems. That’s right: it’s tax week. I’ve decided not to give into the terror, even though the three-thousand-euro tax bill I have to pay (most of which I probably could have dodged if I had the kind of resources to pay a serious tax accountant) effectively puts me out of business. Instead I pore over my spreadsheets and listen to a collection of angry music about government overreach. 

via Pinterest

What? Oh, that’s right – it’s Hallowe’en too. Have you seen the ghouls on the streets, the face-painted demons riding the bus home from the school Hallowe’en party? It’s a time of year when you get to act like somebody else completely. Which is magical for kids, but for any adult who works in an office or has an Instagram profile, well, that’s just another normal day. But while we’re talking about dressing up, let me tell you about an epiphany I had during the week.

By sharing this with you, I am about to embark upon something new. We have talked a great deal here about Boswell’s Bubble: your self-perpetuating community inside government, where performance is measured by political points rather than actual change; how the bubble keeps you from being properly informed and, above all, how it insulates you from the real suffering which you have been tasked to salve. But I’m ready to stop complaining. My biographers may look back on this particular moment in my squalid literary career as the pivot on which I turned away from such complaints, to solutions.

This one came to me as I was concluding last week’s post. In the unlikely event that you didn’t actually read that message, let me catch you up: I was musing on the vast chasm of reality that lies between you and the people you’re supposed to represent. I was moved to this thought by the movie I had just watched, Rosie, and the subsequent confrontation I was forced to have with myself by the very act of watching that movie.

That was a movie, of course: one degree removed from real life. When I faced a homeless man immediately after walking out of the cinema, it was all I could do to simply pass him two euro and keep silent, disgusted as I was with my own, relatively fortunate, position. It led me to think of the degrees to which you – a well-heeled government minister – must be removed from the destitute and discarded individuals whom it is your brief to rescue. And thus the idea hit me.

Here’s my pitch. Every minister, soon after taking office, is mandated to spend a week as a regular citizen, and tasked with surviving some everyday obstacle which lies in their ministerial portfolio. We’d call it Undercover Minister – a spin on the Undercover Boss TV show.

The obvious example would be Regina Doherty. She’d have to leave her pearl earrings behind and go on minimum wage for 7 days, serving drunk and angry customers in Abrakebabra at 2am just like Des Bishop did back in the day.

 

But if we put our heads together, we can think of much more creative experiments…

Simon Harris is a prime target. Let’s give him a medical card and a strain of some communicable disease. Nothing too serious now – a bit of flu maybe – something which it’d take him a week to get over. Send him off to St. James’s A&E and watch him wait there just as the infection is starting to kick in. Cold sweats start to mess up his coiffed hair and run down those beautiful baby cheeks. He starts to become delirious; he pleads with the receptionist, but she has a triage system that no one is going to mess up. Watch him then plead with the overburdened nurses from his hospital trolley, a pale skeletal mess raging against the system like millions of citizens before him.
No one will see him until Tuesday because the absentee doctors are busy tending to their private practice. And hey – it’s not like he can make a complaint.

For your undercover mission, we would have you run the gauntlet of emergency accommodation. The only possessions you could bring with you would be your phone and whatever you can fit in the boot of your car. A bit of disguise would first of all be necessary.  You’re too recognizable: any hotelier or bureaucrat you encounter would immediately recognise you and turn their obsequiousness up to 11 appropriately. So, I’m thinking a fake handlebar moustache to start, and why not throw in some leather pants and a denim jacket, because hey – it’s Hallowe’en.

After that, we would equip you with the list. As I’m sure you know, the social services issue to anyone facing homelessness a list of hotels and hostels which they can call to try to get a room. For a week, then, your sole purpose is to find and live in emergency accommodation for each of the seven nights.

But for this experience to be as authentic as possible, we need to instil you with some degree of hopelessness. For the people who face the prospect of sleeping rough every night (almost 10,000 according to the most recent count), what’s almost worse than the cold and the indignity is the lack of control they feel they have over such a fundamental part of life as shelter; and for one reason or another, these folks have no recourse to family and friends. Before we send you out into the night, then, we’ll need to change the locks on your home, delete all your friends’ phone numbers from your contacts list, and equip your car with a tracking device. We need to be sure that you’re not sneaking off to a friend’s spare room or knocking on your parents’ door. In short, we need to sever you of any support network, just like your constituents in emergency accommodation.

You may already be nodding in approval, while quantifying the publicity you could get from this. But in Undercover Minister there are no TV cameras; no way to spin this. It would have to be done completely anonymously. Why? Well, there are 3 purposes to the experiment, and PR doesn’t enter into any of them. The first purpose is for ministers to step away from the general and enter the particular; to see what life is actually like behind the statistics you daily review. Our aim here is to peel away the degrees to which you are removed from your constituents, so you are right up against them and can understand what it means to live life without dignity or control.

Secondly, an experience like this should lead you to improve your job performance. Having lived among people who need immediate help, you might rethink exactly how much of an effect would be had on the housing crisis by your Land Development Agency or the restrictions on AirBnB lettings. These trickle-down politics mean nothing to the people who have fallen between the cracks, and they are so consumed with the basics of life that they have little time to watch your promotional videos. They need a government which provides immediate relief. Ideally, then, your focus would turn to measures which recognise their dignity as citizens and their right, as such, to permanent homes.

Trying to decide whether this is a worthy measure or a fart in a strong wind. Sure the spin team surrounding @MurphyEoghan will soon solve that dilemma I’m sure…#HousingCrisis https://t.co/bwA60TPe57

— Simon MG (@proteksblue) October 25, 2018

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The last purpose is a moral one. By experiencing life as lived by those on the edge of civilization, you reassess your own position therein, and your actions. This is the existential feeling which throttled me last week, having being confronted, on screen and in person, with homelessness.

You might, in your sojourn as a philosophy undergrad, have come across a philosopher called Emmanuel Levinas. His theory of the Other underpins any moral code, from the Sermon on the Mount to Kendrick Lamar’s magnum opus. Levinas says that, by being confronted with someone who is completely unlike you in their status or state of mind, you are compelled for a moment to shed your own self. This loss of who you are leads, ultimately, to a greater degree of empathy. Shorn of your delusions and rational explanations (This person is not like me; This person deserves their misfortune) you feel the immediate need to do all that you can to help this person, this Other.

https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/3BNjuJBicYBzcgos3TPlOx

Needless to say, this level of empathy can never be won by poring over spreadsheets of generalised information in the ministerial office. Although Buswell’s Bubble is still, for me, the most effective explanation for all the government’s failings, I need to shut up about it. Why? Because getting away from the Bubble is the way to sidestep all these failings and look for an actual solution.
We both need to step away from the Bubble, minister. By letting go of your power for a little while, you can learn how best to use it. Leave the mud-slinging and pats on the back behind for a week and look your fellow citizens in the eye. Realise that the waves of your political fortune are dictated not by how your colleagues see you, but by how much you do to assuage the lives of those on the bottom rung of the country’s ladder.

So what do you say? Let’s break out the prosthetics and leather spats and make a go of it.

All the best, minister,
Simon