Has Ireland ever been in such a wildly paradoxical state of confusion?
n the one hand we’re hearing every day about how well the economy is doing and that we will probably weather the economic headwinds coming our way due to the energy crisis arising from the Russian war in Ukraine. On the other hand, more and more heartbreaking stories of people who cannot afford to buy a house. People who are renting for rents that add up to most of their monthly wage.
There seems to be no end in sight.
During an interview with an auctioneer this week, the suggestion that professional people would probably end up living in local authority housing – the way many of our parents did in the Fifties and Sixties – was made.
The haves are those of my generation, people in our forties and fifties who got on the property ladder at a time when there wasn’t a fella with a saw cutting the rungs from under and over you. Mortgage interest rates were higher, but house prices were much lower and yes you could buy a house on a single income, one that was worth three and a half times same.
These days a hard working couple would struggle to get a mortgage for a similar house without assistance from their parents. This is a shocking indictment of how the country has been run by successive governments. Yes, there are always winners and losers due to prevailing economic circumstances, but this time round it seems different.
The Irish economy has been booming and many people are on excellent wages of €70,000 and up, but it’s like pouring money into quicksand because although it looks good on paper, the cash disappears in the looking.
The vicious rent/deposit cycle is causing untold stress for people who are a landlord’s phone call away being cast into a nightmarish world of looking for somewhere else to rent, having lost the parachute of friendly rent rates set years ago.
They plummet into the ridiculous world of rents 30, 40, 50pc higher than what they paid only a few years ago. The Government are in the unenviable position of trying to put a good gloss on things. They can throw €200 here and offer to raise the amount companies can gift to staff by €500 (and this will help many), but it is a sticking plaster over a gaping wound, one that is eating at the very fabric of Irish society.
The schemes coming out this year to put houses within the reach of low to middle income earners, have criteria which are doomed to make them failures. One scheme requires a person or couple to find a house for €250,000 or less and have enough earnings to meet 80pc of the cost of the house. In many parts of Ireland the sums don’t add up for the generations of thirty and twentysomethings who must be so lost and confused and angry by the Ireland of today.
Sinn Fein will capitalise, no doubt, but I have zero confidence they have the answer either. Building is the only answer and the conservative economic policy of the past needs to be switched up for a more liberal spending spree on houses as this, along with our disastrous healthcare system, are the twin crises of the Ireland of the 2020s.
With staff overworked and many healthcare workers yet to get the €1,000 payment, it’s hard to believe anything politicians say these days.
While they squabble, Ireland burns.
