At a time when they are getting a battering in the polls – the latest Ipsos B&A survey has them on a “record low” of just 16% – Fine Gael have had the bright idea of telling older people they should consider downsizing because of a housing crisis which has left swathes of young people emigrating in despair of ever being able to afford a home or a family.
If this is where the party’s new energy is bringing it, no wonder its burning out fast. Perhaps not fast enough according to many of the responses to Fine Gael’s ill-fated video on “right-sizing” which was met with anger, nay fury, from hundreds of online commentators.
“Right-sizing” for “positive ageing”. Could it sound any more like double-speak? ‘Get out of that nice, comfortable house you worked all your life to make your own and raise your kids in, you selfish old git, because we’ve made a hames of housing, and we need to sound like we’ve got some new ideas to deal with it as everyone is really mad and blaming us even though we’ve only been in power, like, for ever.’
In fairness to Minister Kieran O’Donnell, its probably not even his hare-brained scheme, but I thought Fine Gael were the party that focus-grouped every message and only came out with polices if they had been tested to death and approved by their voters – though Fine Gael voters are likely to be older and have bigger houses, so that makes no sense. Maybe they like sinking in the polls? Perhaps it adds a frisson to the tedium of daily politics.
The Minister talked about “practical options for positive ageing” and emphasised that “this is all voluntary”, in case listeners were imagining this was some mad leftie idea to renounce the idea of private property and put your elderly parents out on the road with the bailiffs and their agents smashing in the cabin door in service of the common good.
Well thanks Minister, good to hear that your party thinks our ageing parents should at least have a choice about being sent to live in a shoe-box because they have a spare bedroom or a nice living room or a kitchen that just has too many feet-per-inhabitant space than they should really be entitled to.
The bafflegab continued. Older people can make “a separate living space within their own home” O’Donnell helpfully explained. That sounds pretty grim if you’re a person who likes your own privacy and space which you are bloody well entitled to after working your whole life and then retiring into the maw of a cost-of-living crisis and a housing emergency.
The smooth-talking seemed to ignore the obvious fact that many older people are already facilitating ‘separate living spaces within their own home’ because hundreds of thousands of people in their twenties and thirties can’t find a place to rent, not to mind buy.
In fact. Census 2022 tells us that 440,000 young adults are living with their parents – a total that jumped 13% from the previous tally. Good to know, I suppose, that hundreds of thousand are already partly on board with the ‘separate living space’ carve-up, albeit on an involuntary and likely reluctant basis.
The Minister then said that he would talk to the banks and credit unions about bridging loans to enable older people to sell their homes and downsize, sorry, ‘rightsize’. What planet is he living on? Bridging loans are the stuff of nightmares because they charge higher interest rates, which was a tough challenge even in those golden halcyon days of rock-bottom interest but would have most of us breaking out in a sweat in these times of economic uncertainty and persistent inflation.
The Fine Gael video was watched 132,000 times and liked by 66 people, which I believe the young folks call being “ratioed”. Almost all of the 680 comments seemed furious, or despairing, or contemptuous. “Bedsits for the elderly,” was one acerbic reaction, and there were plenty who saw the whole exercise as trying to guilt older people out of the homes they had lived in for so long.
Care Champions, who do great work in defending the rights of vulnerable people, said it was “very concerning apart from the obvious ageism in this idea to address Govt failure in housing” that the Minister for Older Persons had “not outlined the safeguarding risks, or mitigations against financial abuse, coercion etc” in the proposal.
Nat O’Connor, senior policy adviser at Age Action Ireland, told the Sunday Independent that older people are “very annoyed” with suggestions they should feel “guilty” for living in their own homes.
“Older persons are very annoyed with the idea that anybody should be made to feel guilty for living in their family home. Who is to say what use they have for an extra bedroom in their home? If family come to stay, people have a use for their family home and shouldn’t be put under any pressure to be forced out of it — it should be entirely voluntary,” he said.
Well, of course they are annoyed. And yes, they are dead right, the whole thrust of the plan is to make them feel guilty for not living in a tiny apartment.
This is the generation who grew up in genuinely tough times, with huge emigration and limited access to third-level. They worked like dogs and sacrificed and slaved to own their homes, and they did it without endless mini-breaks and skiiing and avocado toast. So yes, they can have as many spare bedrooms as they like, and they are not to blame for the disastrous management of housing that has left us in a never-ending emergency when it comes to the provision of homes.
The same government that oversaw reckless immigration, refused to tackle the madness of the planning system, allowed vulture funds to outbid citizens for homes, and fail to meet their own housing targets are now trying to make our elderly parents feel guilty for having a spare room for the grandkids to stay. What next, a window tax? Tell them to stick their ‘right-sizing’ where the sun doesn’t shine.