When I think about my earliest memories of a wider world, of a political reality that was outside the bounds of my childhood but beginning to press in upon my awareness, I think, like most Europeans about my age, of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. I understood very little of the complex political dynamics in play, of course, but I was aware of the basic principle of that moment, which was that the wall was falling in the name of freedom: that the people on the other side of it, in countries of the Eastern bloc and the vast expanses of the Soviet Union beyond, were not free in the way that we were and as a result lacked a lot of other things, too.
The political order under which they lived was failing to provide them with basic necessities. They had to stand in long queues for bread and eggs and other necessities, and often the shelves in their grocery stores were bare. What I understood, as a child of nine or 10, was that I was very lucky to live in a western democracy, in a country where I could be free and in which the economy was capable of providing people with the necessities of a decent and relatively prosperous life.
I have been thinking about all of this recently, because for some time now it has felt as though that basic dispensation, that overarching meta-narrative of free market capitalism, has been eroding and collapsing. It is seeming less and less obvious, less and less to be taken for granted, that this economic order is capable of providing people with those basic necessities, or even that it is especially intended to do so. That economic order, as such, has come to seem more and more at odds with the political system with which it has for so long been indelibly associated: democracy.
There are few places, it seems to me, where this dynamic of history is more apparent, more present in people’s lives, than in Ireland. I don’t mean to suggest our country is some kind of dystopian hellscape – it remains, for all its flaws, a relatively humane and decent place in a time of increasing barbarism – but rather that it is a place where the cracks in this narrative have been showing for some time, and are wide enough for an increasingly substantial proportion of our population to have fallen into.
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You likely don’t need to look too far from your own front door or to spend too long flipping through the pages of a newspaper to get a sense of what I’m talking about here. Last week, for instance, there was an article in this paper about a new apartment development in O’Devaney Gardens, Dublin, in which 99 of the units were designated as “affordable housing”, priced at up to €473,000.
Under the Government’s affordable purchase scheme, eligible prospective home buyers are offered a discount on the market value of properties, with the State taking an equity stake proportionate to the discount received.
For these 99 so-called affordable homes – 11 houses and 88 apartments – there was a waiting list of more than 1,000 people. And so, for the 99 people who will acquire for themselves a home deemed affordable by the standards of Dublin at this time, there are more than 900 individuals, couples and families who will not be so lucky. The breadlines get longer, and the shelves get emptier.
I won’t pretend to know what the solution to this is. I know that, for all the extremity of the housing crisis here, Ireland – as representatives of our Government are so keen to remind us – is not a unique case. The crisis has been building for a long time, and will surely take a long time to unravel. But it also seems overwhelmingly obvious that this interminable and deepening malaise, as it is manifested both here and internationally, is a particularly painful symptom of the inadequacy of free market capitalism as a system for allocating the necessary resources for a properly functioning society.
The reason for this is not, in itself, all that complicated. Free market capitalism is very effective at producing commodities that can be bought and sold quickly, cheaply, and at scale. In situations where supply can respond flexibly to demand, and where profit is a reliable outcome, it is enduringly efficient. Housing isn’t really one of these situations. A place to live is not a discretionary purchase but a basic human necessity for which demand doesn’t fall in response to rising prices.
And scarcity is not, as such, a problem to be solved, but an opportunity to be exploited. The endless upward creep of Dublin’s property prices is a disaster for those who don’t already own a home, but a bonanza from the point of view of those for whom property is a speculative asset. The problem, in this sense, is not really that the system is broken so much as that its functioning as intended produces socially intolerable consequences.
I have become increasingly aware of my own good fortune to have been able to buy a home while relatively young, at a time when such things were relatively affordable after the collapse of the Celtic Tiger and before the start of the “recovery” of the housing market. I can find myself taking a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God attitude towards the situation.
Another big way in which I am lucky is that I have children, and those children will grow up and want to have homes of their own. I want them to be able to stay in this country, and preferably not at the cost of living indefinitely in their childhood home. And I also want them to live in a country that is not perpetually defined and deformed by this crisis of fully functioning free market capitalism. They should not have to be lucky to live here. No one should.
