There is an episode in Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago where Tonya explains to Yury that there is no longer any such a thing as a ‘home’ in revolutionary Moscow. “It’s called ‘living space’ now.”
The episode where Tonya’s house is commandeered by the local reds who proceed to force them into a small room and steal their goods – but curiously not their books it always struck me – is one of the most powerful in the David Lean movie which has already been shown again this Christmas.
The film version is not exactly true to the book but it does capture the essence of what was taking place, as Yury came to understand that he was “a pygmy before the monstrous machine of the future.”
Now, it would be a stretch even for myself to make the jump from Moscow in 1918 to Ireland in 2025, but I will in any event.
Let me presage that by quoting from the ESRI end of year economic summary published last week. It stands over its earlier prediction of 35,000 housing completions in 2025 and sticks with its forecast of 36,000 for 2026.
Bearing in mind that the Government target under the revised National Planning Framework was for 41,000 this year; 43,000 for 2026, and a total of 303,000 by 2030 it does not take a track bookie to do a quick calculation on the odds of meeting any of those targets.
There is already a shortfall of 13,000 in the first two years of the ‘plan’ which would require an average new build already close to the 60,000 annual target that was only to be attained in 2030.
Call me a cynic but having looked at the forecasts and the figures going back ten years or more to the housing targets set out in the National Development Plan and the adjacent Project 2024 I would stake my own ‘living space’ on none of the above targets being met.
(The annual average target for 2018 – 2040 was 25,000, by the way. Just in case you think I am imagining things or making them up.)
There was a time when such a target would have been reasonable and would most likely have been reached. The reason why the targets have not been reached and will not be reached is mass immigration.
Now, even many of the bien pensants – who always know what is best for us and have spent years ‘othering’ anyone who nodded towards the elephant in the housing corner as Hitler – are admitting that there is a connection between immigration and housing demand. Some day they might even recognise that there is also a connection between the emigration of thousands of young Irish people and housing supply and pricing.
Of course, their acceptance of reality is contextualised by totally irrelevant cliches about the need for diversity and equality and that there are brickies and sparks from other countries doing their best to ensure that the other immigrants who account for the vast proportion of new housing demand and occupancy have somewhere to lay their head between shifts in one of the tech and other companies that almost exclusively hire from abroad.
Enough of that. Let us get back to ‘living space.’ While the Government has not yet made common cause with the communist intellectual successors of the reds who stole people’s homes in Moscow, and who would not be totally averse to doing the same here, they are in the same book, if not on the same page.
In the Housing for All and the Delivering Homes, Building Communities policy documents there are references to ‘rightsizing.’ Sounds better than ‘downsizing’ but as a famous musician used to say at the end of another retuning, “Sounds the same to me.”
It will all be voluntary, of course, but the objective is to “support older households who choose to voluntarily rightsize,” and “supporting social housing tenants who wish to rightsize to more suitable accommodation.”
The message being – and it has been backed by a narrative about taking in students and lodgers and getting a smaller gaff which has permeated the public consciousness – your house is too big. I have heard several people who ought to know better talk about how some of their neighbours with a four bedroom or three bedroom house with only one room needed since the kids left for Oz might take in people or even move into a granny/grandad flat.
Why should they? We are not talking about people who own lots of empty houses, we are talking about middle class and ‘settled’ working class families who have managed over the course of a working life and through holding up their end of what is still laughably referred to as the ‘social contract’ to create a bit of comfort for themselves.
They are entitled to that comfort and to have a nice home – not a bloody living space – and to have their grandchildren maybe come over and stay. Oh no. They apparently carry some burden of privilege and a duty to redress social inequality and to ensure that strangers have a room and a hot plate because the developer class and overseas funds cannot throw up enough egg boxes to keep pace with the human resources departments of Google and private nursing homes.
I’m with another victim of the Bolshevik Reds on all of this. Ivan Bunin, the first Russian to win a Nobel Prize for literature in 1933, described the revolutionary period as ‘Cursed Days.’ Unlike the fictional Yury Zhivago and Bunin’s real life friend Maxim Gorky, Bunin could not see the upside of chaos, slaughter, theft and rape justified by the myth of making the world a ‘better place.’
There is no rationale for undermining entire societies and established ways of doing things to suit others whose only connection to a place is an economic nexus. If the state cannot find enough places for immigrants to live, then perhaps they might consider lowering immigration rather than expecting the rest of us to lower our standards to accommodate it. And certainly not by sharing one’s ‘living space.’