Here’s a simple statement of fact which should shock the nation, but to which most of us seem to be relatively numb: At a time when there is a housing crisis and record numbers of homeless people in our country, the Irish Government is devoting considerable resources to make a man called Sean Meehan homeless.
For those of you who have not followed the story, the video below is an interview with Mr. Meehan conducted almost a year ago by my colleague Fatima:
Like all too many people in our country, Sean Meehan went through a marriage breakdown. On foot of that marriage breakdown, the couple amicably divided their assets, which included selling their family home.
To cut a long story short, Mr. Meehan bought a small plot of land near his sister’s home. Onto that land he put a mobile home. He then, with the aid and assistance of friends, turned the property into what is an objectively beautiful little cottage, replete with central heating, a septic tank, a connection from the ESB, and everything else you need to live a basic modern life.
There are two ways of looking at this: The first is as a success story and a triumph of self-reliance. Mr. Meehan has taken charge of his own life and, without burdening the rest of us, found somewhere to live that is nicer than what the state might, in many cases, have offered him. Further, by doing the work himself, he has saved valuable state resources for others who might lack either his vision or his ability to make that vision a reality.
That is not how the state sees it. The state sees his case as little more than a breach of planning law, and has devoted considerable time and legal resources to forcing him to dismantle his cottage, and become homeless again. Should the state succeed, Mr. Meehan will recoup nothing. He will literally have to stand there and watch as state-ordered bulldozers trample his investment and work and roof into the ground.
Lest anyone mistake me, planning regulations are clearly and obviously there for a reason. This column does not seek to argue for example that Mr. Meehan would have had the right to buy a field somewhere and build forty homes on it for commercial sale. Nor, to my eyes, does there appear to be much doubt that he did, in fact, breach the planning laws as they are currently constituted. Various courts have agreed that he did.
Sometimes, however, it takes a breach of the law to demonstrate conclusively that the law is an ass. In this case, that the laws of the land are functionally insane in this area should be clear and obvious to every policymaker with a brain. All two or three of them.
That Ireland has an unprecedented housing crisis has, after all, been used to justify all sorts of amendments to law. We have rent pressure zones and rent caps, on the grounds that such intrusion into the rights of landlords is justified by a housing crisis. The state has resorted via first-time-buyer grants to actively giving people cash to help them buy homes. Yet tearing down this cabin remains officially a state priority.
One of the problems with the state in general is how much it is committed to defending the system itself over anything else. In this case, I will make the arguments that the bureaucrats make in order to demonstrate the point. In the case of Sean Meehan and his cabin, they would say the following:
They would say that if you concede in one case then the entire integrity of the planning system is compromised. That it would encourage others to flout planning laws and then rely on public sympathy to get away with so doing. That in short order, the Irish countryside would be littered with illegal encampments, not all of them from people as sympathetic as Sean Meehan. They would say that every law brings about hard cases, and that conceding those hard cases sometimes makes bad law. If they were really trying to appeal to your law and order side, they might quietly ask you how you would feel if members of the travelling community bought a plot of land next to you and decided to build a cabin there, over your planning objections, and the state ignored it. We have to enforce the law, they’d say, otherwise the whole system might collapse.
The problem with this argument is that it wholly ignores the basic point of a democracy, which is that the public are entitled to be fickle. The system already accounts for this in other areas: A criminal jury is entirely entitled, should it so desire, to acquit an obviously guilty person on the grounds that they felt his crime was reasonable.
In planning law, that same entitlement does not exist. Which is why one obvious reform would be to make it exist.
Sean Meehan, like any other accused lawbreaker, should be entitled to put his case to a jury of his peers. I suspect that a jury might not arrive at the same inflexible conclusions that the system has arrived at.
In any case, this is the position, and it is one reason why last week the Government finally started to wake up to cases like Mr. Meehan’s and talk about reforming the law in this area. In the meantime, Mr. Meehan is facing potential jail time for contempt of court, since he has thus far refused to comply with court orders to dismantle his home.
His case, in my view, encapsulates a lot of what is wrong with the country. Here is a man who has done his best to house himself and not be a burden on the state or the rest of society. And he is being punished for it, by a system that – right across Government – too often sees citizens as impediments to the proper running of the national bureaucracy.