One of the things that has irritated me about the Irish property market is that there have been discussions on who could and who should be able to buy property to live in. It’s frustrating in a way because it implies some sort of a value judgment on how there are some people who deserve good stuff and some who don’t. And that good stuff seems to be defined on the basis of economic merit.
The most essential jobs done on a day to day basis in the city of Dublin – arguably – are the refuse collectors. That’s regardless of whether they are paid by a private operator or the local council. The fact is their service is completely essential to the functioning of the city. They are not, however, economically valued as such. They are working class and of a class that others feel shouldn’t necessarily aspire to being able to buy their own home. No one has ever come up with an adequate reason other than they shouldn’t be earning enough.
I’ve been throw those arguments a lot and they crop up a lot. Not just for houses. There are some people who shouldn’t be able to go on holidays to Spain (an argument in favour of reducing the old age pension – if they can afford to go to Spain, they have too much money).
Interestingly enough, I don’t see this as capitalist thinking but socialist thinking; and yet the people who come up with some of these comments would scream if you suggested they had anything in common with socialism.
But it does give some pause for consideration. Is this the sort of society we want to live in? I mean, one of the things that has annoyed me most about living in Ireland over the years is the inability of some Irish people to accept that other people see the world differently to them. So for example, I honestly believe that if someone wants a Rolls Royce and has spent 30 years saving for it, then they should be able to park it outside their house in Tallaght without some busybody questioning how they can afford it and commenting – because of prejudgment – that they get too much on the dole.
Irish people are bad at that. Very bad at applying their own prejudices to something they don’t know very much about and assuming they are right. This leads to big problems in stupid places like people giving advice to landlords on how to get rid of tenants “Just change the locks. It’s your house”. Ignorance parades and it is never learned from.
I’m not sure how we can change it. But ultimately, when you look at the whole question of the economic mess we are in, there are armies of people wandering around implying they know best how people should spend their money. And the only thing that counts is making money work to make money.
Well that’s fine. If I’d taken the advice of everyone to buy a house in the last 6 years I’d be down 100KE and living somewhere I never, ever wanted to live, ever. If I’d invested in bank shares, I’d have lost pretty much everything. Instead, my camera equipment is still worth something and not causing me headaches.
Society is not well served by people walking aroudn thinking they can decide who deserves a widescreen TV or not. I think part of it might be insecurity; an easy way of proving “hey, I did better than you, I have the X5 and the flatscreen television”. I’m just not sure it counts for much in the long term and it’s building a society on a culture of envy rather than growth.
It’s just, how do you change people’s attitudes? When they don’t even realise just how obnoxious their attitude is?
I’d like to live in a country where the weakest are supported without the richest looking askance on it. I’d like to live in a country where the rich are not allowed get away with daylight robbery until the nakedness really can’t be seen. We have an economy that has been screwed up not by the poor wanting a flatscreen television but by the rich for whom too much was not enough.
I’d like to live in a country where working class people are not judged for wanting to buy their own houses. Particularly since currently I live in a country where tenants are regularly screwed over. I’d like to live in a country where a) it’s socially acceptable to rent and where b) rents are reasonable. Right now, they are not and it will be years before things are sorted out here.
I feel sometimes like the family at the end of the Bodhranmakers by John B. That they’ve put everything into their local community and still, the prejudices of higher up make it more attractive to remove themselves. In the 50s it may well have been the church but the church I think was a vehicle for the judgemental attitudes of the Irish. Much as the church is dying out, to some extent, the attitudes are not.
I wonder why sometimes.
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