A Landlord's Life

"We're all equal here," cooed the woman waiting to board the Malaga flight, showing off her purchases and finding, to much hilarity, that her friends had bought the same outfits in the same Dublin Shop.

Apparently, shops are stocking summer holiday gear well into autumn, catering for the new money, commuting to their holiday homes at the drop of an email. With hundreds of thousands now owning foreign property, airlines and shops are servicing this market. Behind her, as she waved her branded bags, an actor intoned from the airport Sky coverage of the American mid-term elections. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

Well, clearly not true in terms of physical abilities - or there would be no great athletes. Not true, either, in terms of intellectual abilities, or there would be no great scientists. And so on, down through the variegated gamut of human endeavour, it is demonstrably not true that all men are created equal. Or so I mused, reading the paper headlines as we shuffled aboard.

As we know (again!) from this week's news, being born black in Africa and becoming a migrant in Ireland is about on a par with being born white into the Irish suburbs of Moyross or Finglas. A male in those racial or geographic categories is more likely to suffer harassment and assault than millions born elsewhere.

Property was regarded as theft by revolutionaries of a couple of centuries ago. "All property is theft" ran one slogan, hung outside the houses of the aristocrats, prior to them being sequestered by the French mob. Marx elaborated to make a mantra of "no private property" whereby the communist countries of the early 20th century took over the landed estates of the aristocrats, allegedly on behalf of the peasantry. The apparatchiks promised to divide among the needy . . . "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs".

It never happened. Iron ideology sabotaged the highly moral theory. The peasantry were deprived of their relationship of mutual dependency with the landlords, herded into collectives and humiliated down through the generations with families living in a single room with primitive sanitation. On the farm they had space and the dignity of work. In the collectives they were herded into factories. No dignity, no life and eventually no communist state.

In the break-up of those communist states during the 1990s, land title was acquired by millions of party supporters, functionaries whose methods mirror Fianna Fail councillors on planning committees (Russian equivalent: Kommisariat). Having encountered both in another life, I am reminded how the similarities are both awesome and striking. Both the Irish and Russian apparatchik species shared a lineage of knowing how the system worked, how the country was run after a revolution, who to bribe and in whose ear to have "the word".

Fortunes beyond avarice were made in both countries by such attachment to property and planning matters. In Russia of the 1990s, a bullet in the head was the penalty for "non-compliance". In Ireland of the 1960s the penalty was exclusion from Taca, the builders conduit for "political donations" to Fianna Fail. By the 1990s, non-compliance simply meant not being welcomed at the Fianna Fail tent at the Galway Races. We do things differently here . . .

Ho-hum, you may think, how overly serious is our landlord today. Gloomy, when he should be cheerful, getting off this mad island and onto another mad place, only with better sun and more space. I agree with you, dear reader. Put it all down to the lady with the shopping bags, coo-ing in my ear about how equal we all are . . .