When musing on the state of this country over recent days, the thought came to me that Ireland feels more and more like a nation in decline.
Of course there are those who will immediately try to pooh pooh this by pointing to our massive tax revenues, but you don’t have to be an economist to understand that these are massively inflated by phantom Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and that Ireland actually scores pretty badly when it comes to Actual Individual Consumption (AIC), or the amount of money each individual personally has.
This is part of why the tricolour can place so high on the list of richest countries in the world while many hard working Irish people struggle with the ever increasing cost of living. The expectations versus reality of living in a country that often places in the top five of the world’s most wealthy is quite stark.
Yesterday I came across a story about an 87-year-old woman named Joan who is about to lose her home of 23 years.
Joan, who I am told has been living in the Dún Laoghaire area for the past 50 years, must return the keys to the landlord by Friday, and has nowhere to go.
It appears the situation is related to the landlord wanting to sell up, that there’s nothing fishy about it on paper, and that the landlord isn’t some kind of foreign fund but an individual.
These situations are complicated as they often come down to the conflicting interests of a person who has invested in a property and is renting it for a profit (as is their right) and the needs of a renter who is not in such a fortunate position.
Whatever the ins and outs of this story may be, the fact is that a widow in the winter of her years will be without a home this Friday, and no happy ending has thus far made itself known to her or her daughter with whom she shares the house.
A message posted on Facebook by her granddaughter says that Joan is on the Dún Laoghaire Rathdown council housing list but that she has not been offered anything. It’s probably not necessary to point out that many who find themselves on those lists face a purgatory of uncertain duration with some even waiting over a decade to be offered a home.
While the message also says that Joan has been approved for Housing Assistance Payment (HAP) her granddaughter says that she still couldn’t find anywhere she can afford.
The sheer cruelty of a woman Joan’s age having to simultaneously pack up a house full of belongings, communicate with the landlord, and try to find a new place, all the while facing into an era filled with uncertainty is enough to make one’s blood run cold.
With no council properties available, Joan will likely be forced to wait until she is actually out the door and on the street before emergency accommodation services – which have been put under tremendous strain due to unprecedented immigration numbers – can kick in.
As my colleague, Ben Scallan, recently reported over 50% of those in emergency accommodation are not Irish. The absurdity of housing large numbers of migrants who cannot support themselves in this country when so many of our own are in need is ludicrous beyond expression, and yet this is reality and it doesn’t look like it’s going to change anytime soon.
While it may seem plain silly that someone has to be ‘on the street’ before these services can become available, this is a rule put in place to try and deter people from automatically relying on these services to the detriment of their efforts to find accommodation themselves.
It makes sense logically, but when someone is of advanced years, holding them to this rigid standard is just cruel. It’s difficult enough for a PC literate person to search for properties to rent online, never mind someone close to 90.
I think the way a nation treats its elderly shows its true character. The elderly should be cherished for their wisdom, their past labour, and their contribution to society. Instead they are often overlooked when they are no longer economically active, much like batteries when the Christmas lights start to grow faint.
When we hear of scenarios like this one – and we hear about quite a lot of them – there is often a tendency to ask why the unfortunate subject can’t go and live with relatives. I understand the instinct here, but the reality is that many of us are living with our backs to the wall.
We don’t have spare properties lying around, we don’t always have spare bedrooms, and we may not even have space to help store decades of amassed belongings alongside decades of our own.
In today’s Ireland space is very much at a premium.
When someone has difficulty with housing there is often an assumption that they have been irresponsible in some way, or that the situation was somehow of their own making.
While this may be true in some cases, it is also true that even people who work full time and do ‘everything right’ economically can still find themselves struggling to afford something as basic as a roof over their heads, or as our disastrous government likes to say when they promise housing to foreign nationals, “own door accommodation”.
Not only is the government elected to serve the interest of the Irish people spending millions annually to house migrants on the island, it is also giving vast sums of our money to NGOs for foreign aid projects.
Should the measure of modern Ireland be of a country where people scrape by on whatever is left after they pay their rent? Should it be one where those fortunate enough to be approved for a mortgage end up paying back twice what the property is worth in interest over the years? Should it be one where fewer and fewer of us enjoy the security of home ownership as we drift into old age?
Our exchequer returns may on the surface tell a tale of prosperity befitting a modern economic power house, but the lives of many of our people simply don’t reflect that.