Bank of Ireland’s new ad: Old people have too much space and should move out

Bank of Ireland has a new video ad. In the one-minute ad, an elderly mother is shown moving with some reluctance out of her "empty nest" home and into a newly built house with her son, his partner and two smiling children.

The ad is problematic as in my view it uses particularly sensitive aspects of home life in Ireland just to sell mortgages. It also commodifies the most private and human of social and spatial settings, the home.

The ad begins with the mother descending the stairs of her own home, a task clearly implied to be difficult for her. Downstairs, in a hall packed with boxes, she looks around her patterned, carpeted (read: old) house and furniture. Here, she recalls the memories of a life lived. Her husband is gone, now only there in a photo, and, it appears from the ad, the house is “failing” her.

The message in this ad appears to be that "home" is something you buy, just bricks and mortar, something easily recreated, not something actually reflected in you

“It’s nice Mam,” her son assures in the car, as she leaves behind her traditional red-brick house, with its mature hedge and distinct material character. She soon arrives at a white, brand new, “soft-modernist” house with a “Sold” sign outside and no garden to speak of.

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Inside the new house, the family is gathered in a typical, market-ready, non-offensive kitchen in grey and beige, straight out of a property supplement. Her son’s partner is visible in the background in a T-shirt, settled in, but the older woman keeps her coat on, walking around, clearly reluctant, not happy at home – just yet.

The ad then borrows a home-makeover trope from property lifestyle television. The mother is shown a room without character, still under construction, and told it is hers. She appears doubtful (after all, she has a whole house that is already finished waiting for her at home); her son looks worried. Cut to the day of the move, and her grandchildren lead the woman, eyes covered, into her new room.

A second trope of property television is used, that of the “big-reveal” in which the doubtful person is typically overwhelmed by emotion at the results of a home/garden makeover, but, in the end, all doubts are shown to be unfounded. The young couple have, in fact, rebuilt her exact old room in the new house, decorating it with her sofa, wallpaper and mementoes,

“Welcome home, Mam,” says her son, but, in my view, this cannot be her home as it is not the actual room in which her husband sat, in which she kissed him, in which they watched TV, in which that son once played. She has in effect been made an exhibit in some frozen installation of her life.

As the mother drives away from her own home, its red windows and brick were nostalgically shown reflected in her face. But the message in this ad appears to be that "home" is something you buy, just bricks and mortar, something easily recreated, not something actually reflected in you.

This is an oversimplification of the complex, human, social and emotional life this woman has been leading in her own house, building her home there in a community, quite possibly for decades.

Questions arise: is the mother now confined to this one room that is like her “old” home? Where does she sleep? How far from her friends has she moved? Will she see them again? Did she have to sell so her son and his family could have a home of their own? And why did they not move into her big house instead?

The ad is dealing with a difficult subject, a dilemma many people face in life and parents living with children is great if that is what all decide. But in this ad, the message appears to be that mortgage-free mothers are not useful customers; they just might have too much space on their hands; it might be good if they did us a favour if they sold up and moved so new families could start; and all that, in the end, one room is enough.

Intentionally or not, this ad points to another unpleasant aspect of Ireland’s commodified housing culture. This is a culture that seeks to strip people of their homes, like a tired old wallpaper, gone out of style. It is now a culture of commodification that clearly does not discriminate on the basis of age.

Emmett Scanlon is an architect, podcaster and academic