Sir, - There are many people, now in the autumn of their lives, for whom the Celtic Tiger came too late; many for whom the various housing initiatives do nothing; many, like my family, who have not the least prospect of ever owning a house this side of a Lottery win - and we now find the tickets too expensive! There are many like us who have been on housing lists since our children were at junior school. Now they have left home and are married, and we are grandparents.
When I checked with the housing authorities three months ago on the basis of the number of points accumulated to date set against the current level required to be offered social housing - and assuming the list does not lengthen - I calculated that my wife and I would be 123 years old before we stood a chance of getting near the top of the list.
Frankly, we do not particularly want to "own" a home. We cannot take it with us when we go. By then our children, fortunately, will not depend on our leaving property to them. What we do desire at our time of life is security of tenure. Living in private rented accommodation gives us no security. Thanks to our laws, in a few years' time our landlord will have to terminate the tenancy in his own interests. Given recently escalated property and rental values we, and many others like us, simply will not be able to afford private rented accommodation. The certainty of being homeless in our late 60s or early 70s is a nightmare scenario.
To those of us in such circumstances it seems that, as far as planners and politicians are concerned, we do not count and they do not care. We are members of that generation who struggled along in the less good time, raised families, paid taxes, did and still do what we can for the common weal and, seemingly, were short on good luck. It seems we are fated to be left on life's scrap heap. Our only consolation is that, come the next election, if amazingly there is a party that can honour its promises, our votes are worth just as much as those of the great and until recently thought to be good, whose largesse is now being studied by tribunals.
But that does not solve our housing problems! - Yours etc., John Wheeler,
Railway Avenue, Inchicore, Dublin 8.