Another slice of Bacon won't matter

When I was leaving school, careers guidance wasn't the art-form that it now is. As a young woman, you either went to college (in which case the most likely result was that you'd be a teacher), you became a nurse, or you looked for a permanent and pensionable job in the civil service or the financial sector.

Of course the financial sector back then was pretty much the banks and the insurance companies and your lot in life was either counting cash or counting policies.

Probably because I liked to throw the occasional spanner in the works, I used to ask about trades such as being an electrician or plumber, but they were always going to be a non-runners for someone who regularly forgot to put water in the kettle and didn't even like seeing hairs in the bathroom hand basin.

Consultancy was something that happened only in the doctor's surgery (and female doctors weren't much in evidence). The only business consultancy I knew about was a visit to the bank. Economic consultancy probably happened, but passed me by completely.

I knew plenty of economists, of course, once I stumbled into financial services, but they were paid to do a particular job (usually to say that inflation was out of control and that the government needed to do something about it, plus ca change). I don't remember any of them getting a regular brief to provide consultancy services to anyone.

Which is not to say that it didn't happen, only that I never noticed.

But nobody could be unaware of Dr Peter Bacon's third report on the housing market in Ireland. (Has anyone done better out of the housing market than Dr Bacon?) I can't see the point in this annual report-fest of consultancy, much as I think some of the ideas are as good as any others.

But why every year? Presumably because things are worse now than they were when the first report came out. But if the Government were unwilling to act on that a couple of years ago, or only acted on it in a piecemeal fashion, what was the point in commissioning another report to tell it the same thing? And yet another?

All of which basically say that investment and speculative (oh, that word!) money is pushing up the price of housing and that there aren't enough houses being built for the number of people who want to buy them.

And so we go on the treadmill of tweaking away with taxes on speculators - though how you're actually going to separate them from long-term investors is beyond me. Let's face it, in the financial markets a long-term investment is sometimes a short-term one that went horribly wrong.

And we mutter about making it easier to get planning permission (is that actually a good thing?) for new developments, although in the last few weeks most of the developments I've seen advertised have been at the higher end of the market - you know, the £1 million-plus (€1.27 million) houses designer driven to within an inch of their cobble-locked driveways.

Since builders and developers are in it for the money, it seems to me they'll happily keep filling that sector of the market, which doesn't do anything for the first-time house buyer unless he or she managed to cash in their technology chips back in March and is in a position to splash out on electronically-gated living environments.

Meanwhile, investors/ speculators, whatever you want to call them, will probably just shove up rents to cover their extra taxation costs for those who didn't declare income before now.

Regretfully, the problem is still one of supply and demand, and Irish people wanting semidetached houses with gardens close to the city centre - a virtual impossibility in almost any other European capital city.

I know it's easy for me to say because I actually have a house and a garden and I like having them, but I look on it as my reward for having stayed here during the 1980s and being taxed beyond all reason when my contemporaries were leaving in droves.

Anyway, whether or not the proposals in Bacon make any difference or not is a moot point to the man himself, who is probably already thinking about "Bacon 4 - just as you thought it was safe to take out another huge mortgage".

Still on the housing theme, I mentioned a few weeks ago there were two apartment developments currently under construction on the Howth Road, one of which is nearing completion (although not before causing complete chaos the other day when someone burst a water main and flooded the road).

Unfortunately, I didn't bother going in to look at the original planning application, but I can't believe that the builders were allowed to cut down the row of trees that had originally hidden the site from the road.

Admittedly these were lleylandii which are, apparently, the fastest growing pest-like tree in the universe and much hated by most gardeners, but they did screen the site and were distinctly more attractive facing the road than a stark block of apartments ever will be.

And I would've thought that the potential purchasers would have preferred a vista of trees rather than a vista of traffic jams. But maybe the investors, sorry speculators, don't care about the view.

The final word has to go to the bird in the back garden which, if you remember, had fallen out of its own home. A number of people have asked me how it got on. I'd love to be able to report that it recovered, flew away and is now happily nesting in one of the remaining trees on the Howth Road, but real life isn't like that. It seems that it was injured in its fall and was never going to be able to fly. The cat had nothing to do with its demise (which was a relief), so I guess the bird just ran out of steam as it tried and tried to get airborne. I have to say I was devastated. The previous day it had hopped up to the patio door and was peering in the window.

Sometimes things don't end happily ever after, do they?