Is it merely a coincidence that racism and bigotry have become more widespread since house prices began galloping upwards?
I spent last week killing ants. I poisoned them. I chased them. I squashed them. The insecticide which I used was going to take seven to 10 days to wipe out the nest. But that wasn't quick enough for me. I kept watch in the kitchen and pounced on any strays who didn't take the lethal bait which I had laid.
It's only now that they're gone that I feel ashamed. They could have lived with me. The vast majority had obediently stayed outside the house - those, I didn't mind. It was only the occasional one who turned up on the kitchen floor or worktop which drove me into a murderous frenzy.
And yet they could easily have been dealt with by sealing a hole in the outside wall through which they were entering. Or I could have let the odd one in to share my food: why ever not? A pest-control expert has since informed me that black ants of the type which I massacred neither bite nor carry germs.
But, no, my instinct was to kill. And this despite having recently seen that convincing piece of insect propaganda, the cartoon movie Antz, in which Woody Allen is the voice of the loveable "Z" and Sharon Stone is the ant-princess who saves him from the clutches of the humans. Those cute little bugs in my kitchen could have been their children, for heaven's sake. What troubles me most about the incident, however, was not my suspected cruelty, but the emotion which lay behind it. What was it, I asked myself, which I found so antagonising? It wasn't the sight of them: I've no phobia of insects. Nor was it the threat of being "overrun" as there were no more than a couple of bugs in the kitchen at one time. In fact, my decision to kill could not be characterised in any sense as rational - if there was a good reason to exterminate the ants, I wasn't aware of it. And if I had been aware, it wouldn't have explained the ferocity of my rage.
The truth is that I was responding to that mean-spirited and lowly of instincts which is synonymous with the Irish homeowner: a fear of the unknown. I perceived a threat to my property which had little, if any, grounding in fact, and I reacted with force. These ants were in my home - my home. They were upsetting the order. And worse, they were doing so without a word of consultation, without a "hello" or an "excuse me". Was I to tolerate them - in my home? No, way!
This condition - of which, I fear I had fallen foul - is so widespread in Irish home-owners that I'm surprised we have yet to be formally diagnosed or admitted for treatment. NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) syndrome and BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything) disorder are sometimes used to describe it. However, these both relate to only one form of the multi-faceted disease whose manifestations range from my zealous ant killing to the protest of a faceless resident in north Co Dublin against the relocation of psychiatric patients to his neighbourhood. Property Protection Paranoia (PPP) would be an appropriate term for the malady, although KKK might be a better acronym given the activities of some of its sufferers.
Part of the difficulty with treating this illness is that some do not see it as a problem. Indeed, the fortress mentality which underlies it has its cheer-leaders in the form of residents' associations, soulless bodies united by a selfish desire to protect their assets from real or imaginary dangers. What principled agents these associations are. If not objecting to the housing of some minority group in their neighbour hood, or holding up the development of a beneficial piece of State infrastructure, they are refusing to pay taxes designed to encourage waste minimisation and a healthier environment. Some, undoubtedly, pursue worthy and selfless causes, although they are, I fear, a minority. The typical association tends to be nothing more than a collection of local busy-bodies and front-lawn fascists who could be dismissed as charming eccentrics if only they kept to trivial matters such as grass-cutting. But, sadly, they interfere in some literally life-and-death issues - such as the provision of basic services for Travellers - and are in indulged in the process by local authorities and a media which would often do better to ignore them.
"All we want is to be consulted," they cry, when consultation is merely a by-word for delaying, by saying "no" in as many ways as possible. As it provides a formula for inaction, however, the request is often met with a welcome reception by local and national authorities. Hence even the most minor and uncontroversial of developments is now subject to an "extensive and widespread" consultation process. But while residents' associations can be blamed for encouraging Property Protection Paranoia, the condition is independent of them and, indeed, pre-dates them by some centuries. The impact of homeownership on a person's character was recognised at least as far back as Plato's time. Athenian democracies then limited voting rights to "stakeholders" in an effort to guarantee a temperate (i.e. conservative) electorate.
The Irish Government, by encouraging home-ownership and neglecting the rented accommodation sector, has arguably done something similar. If not conservative, the electorate could well be described as reactionary: the perfect match for a populist, political leadership.
However, by far the most significant factor in strengthening our pro-property attitudes, is not the residents' associations nor the Government, but the inflationary housing market which exists at present. Is it merely a coincidence that racism and bigotry have become more widespread since house prices began galloping upwards? Or are many of these expressions of intolerance - against asylum seekers, Travellers, psychiatric patients and so on - not rooted in the same kind of paranoia about real or, in these cases, imagined threats to one's home?
THE primacy of property has become a defining principle of modern Ireland. How else could we have developments such as that in Terenure, which I visited recently, where four houses in an estate of more than 100 were built without upstairs windows at the rear, merely because they backed on to a housing scheme for settled Travellers? That such "defences" exist is sad. That they go almost unnoticed is even sadder.
The Travelling community is particularly relevant in this regard as it poses a direct challenge to our (the settled community's) attitudes to property. It requires us, in the short-term at least, to tolerate infringements of what we regard as an absolute right to control our land and the land within our locality. And in the longer-term, it requires us to share.
With this in mind, one wonders whether the recent media campaign which sought to highlight discrimination against Travellers would have been more successful if, rather than confronting us with our alleged racism, it addressed our attitudes to property. No one thinks of themselves as a racist or a bigot. Not wishing to be flippant but watching a movie which featured the most positive portrayal of ants imaginable didn't stop me from massacring them. Perhaps what we need more than lessons on race and ethnicity is to be taught to share our homes, and to learn that property has, in the words of Thomas Drummond, "its duties as well as its rights".
The American humanist Robert Green Ingersoll recognised this phenomenon more than a century ago when he said: "Few rich men own their own property. The property owns them". As we become more wealthy, the question becomes increasingly pertinent for all of us: is property enriching our lives or imprisoning us?
Eddie Holt is on holidays