An Irishman's Diary

SINCE the property crash, there has been an unseemly scramble among journalists to lay claim to the title of being first to sound the alarm.

So can I draw everyone’s attention to an article I wrote in 2001 asking: “Is property enriching our lives or imprisoning us?” I’m sure I don’t have to say it but that was seven years before Lehman Brothers collapsed. (Seven years, Morgan Kelly, you hear that.) Naturally, I didn’t quite predict the specific fall in house prices.

Rather, I had focused on the the psychological dysfunction underpinning the Irish fixation with property.

Now before I address the article in question, I must refer to another distasteful journalistic habit, namely using newspaper columns to either resurrect or claim credit for some best-forgotten Celtic Tiger catchphrase. I have to set the record straight, however. It was me who invented the height-of-the-boom term Crispies (Cash Rich Irish Seeking Property in Europe), which was picked up by at least one Sunday newspaper, and today attracts a total of 46 Google references. (Take that, “breakfast-roll man”.)

But back to April 2001 and my plea in this newspaper for Ireland to end its love affair with houses. Opening with an account of what I did the previous week, which in this case was fretting over an ant infestation in my home, I segued into a general theory of how property ownership made people more selfish and irrational, peppering the 1,200 words or so with remarkably apposite quotes, such as the American humanist Robert Green Ingersol’s: “Few rich men own their own property; the property owns them.” What, you might ask, was the reaction?

I received one letter. It was from an elderly woman in Donegal who informed me she also had an ant infestation in her home and wondered had I the name of a good brand of pest killer. (Which, I like to think, just goes to show how deep in denial we all were.)

Of course I wasn’t the first to identify a specific problem attitude in Ireland towards property. Historians and authors have frequently drawn attention to the ferocious attachment we have traditionally had towards the sod or the field, or to bricks and mortar.

In Ulysses, James Joyce wrote "an Irishman's house is his coffin", and while there is an element of dark humour to Bloom's rumination, it has an all-too-grim modern resonance. A recent report from Mabs (Money Advice and Budgeting Service) quotes a number of mortgage holders who have fallen into arrears. "For the last two years, I've hated walking through the door because it's not home any more," said one.

Sadly, it has taken the economic crisis to prompt a rethink in the Irish obsession with property. Previous governments used to brag about how Ireland had the highest rate of home ownership in Western Europe – at well over 80 per cent, compared to less than 50 per cent in Germany.

This was despite a large body of economic research showing high ownership rates undermined labour mobility, thereby worsening unemployment in a recession.

A recent Bloomberg editorial described 64 per cent as the “golden mean in the housing market”, and said exceeding this home ownership rate in the US, or any other country, “can only lead back to instability”. On that basis, a big adjustment is required here, and former minister of state for housing Willie Penrose conceded last September: “Over the medium to long term, reducing our overall rate of home ownership is no bad thing for Ireland as a society and as an economy.”

Penrose, who made those comments in a speech on social housing that was virtually ignored by the media, was probably the first minister in the history of the state to call for a reduction in home ownership. He is now gone from the Government but his plea remains valid, and indeed should be built upon.

A planned reform of tenancy law, strengthening the rights of tenants, will help. The Government must also face down ever-more desperate pleas from the housing industry, the banks and Nama for fresh measures to stimulate demand for new homes. Most of all, though, it needs to challenge underlying cultural values.

What’s required is nothing less than a full-frontal attack on traditional patterns of housing worship, and views like Brian Cowen’s when he told the Dáil as minister for finance in 2007 “home ownership is one of the primary aspirations of the people”. The Irish public won’t easily give up its love of property but it has surrendered other, deeply-ingrained habits, including drink driving and smoking in pubs, and who can say Ireland is worse for it?

At a time when the world’s population has hit seven billion, and we are increasingly dependant upon one another for our survival, the idea of owning a bit of Earth outright, let alone claiming all sorts of rights on the back of it, is perverse. At a more individual level, the idea that home ownership makes you happy has always lacked proof.

For my part, the greatest pleasure I’ve got from owning a house came the time I was renting the blasted thing out while living overseas. No gardening required. No DIY jobs to do. I never felt as free.

Remember where you read it first.