Fintan O’Toole: No faux ruins for us. We mass manufactured the real thing

In the 18th century, when the Protestant Ascendancy was in its pomp, the landlord class spent fortunes building fake ruins. It was the height of fashion to construct buildings that looked like the skeletal vestiges of long-lost edifices.

Some of them, like the vast Jealous Wall on the grounds of Belvedere House outside Mullingar, are quite spectacular. It must have been good, too, to know that the peasants, who lived out of sight in actual hovels, were paying for them through their rents.

In the first decade of the 21st century, the new Irish ascendancy similarly devoted fortunes to the construction of ruins that make up in number what they lack in Gothic grandeur. And it now seems that the peasants will again have the privilege of paying for them.

This modern mania for the erection of tumbledown follies outdid the Ascendancy, not just in extent, but in its conceptual thoroughness

The scale of ruin-building in the Celtic Tiger years is truly impressive. We have 6,600 homes built with blocks containing excessive levels of mica. We have maybe 20,000 properties contaminated with pyrite back-fill.

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Add in about 92,000 apartments blighted by a lack of fire-stopping materials, severe mould, collapsing roof canopies and/or rotting balconies. Plus at least 22 new public schools that have had to have urgent and often extensive remediation work just to make them safe to occupy.

It is quite a feast for connoisseurs of jerry-building: somewhere around 120,000 examples of the indigenous architectural movement that surely deserves to be known as Hibernian Shoddy.

This modern mania for the erection of tumbledown follies outdid the Ascendancy, not just in extent, but in its conceptual thoroughness. The old landlords paradoxically built their ruins to last and many of them still stand.

Celtic Tiger Ireland was more committed to the whole concept of rapid disintegration, creating buildings with built-in obsolescence. No faux ruins for us: we mass-manufactured the real thing.

Our modern masters of Hibernian Shoddy also inflated the costs beyond the most excessive extravagances of a decadent aristocracy. The possible €3.2 billion price tag we are now expected to pick up for a mica redress scheme would surely have caused even the most spendthrift grandee to baulk at the price.

That ordinary homeowners should not be left to face these bills alone goes without saying. The misery of people in Donegal, Mayo and elsewhere, whose homes are crumbling around them, is undoubtedly a proper concern of their fellow citizens.

The prevailing attitude among those involved in the mica shambles seems to be that if they screw up and do shoddy work, it's all the State's fault

What is not so obvious is why equally ordinary taxpayers should be stuck with the bill for these dire failures by private manufacturers and builders.

This all feels very much like a replay on a smaller (but still huge) scale of the bailout of the banks after the crash of 2008. As in that debacle, profits were privatised but costs are to be nationalised.

The State should certainly bear some of the costs because it did undoubtedly contribute to the disaster. This is a delayed bill arriving from the follies of the administrations dominated by Bertie Ahern, Mary Harney and Charlie McCreevy – governments, incidentally, for which many of the affected homeowners must have voted.

Those Fianna Fáil/Progressive Democrat governments were drunk on the ideology of “rugged individualism” in which regulation in the public interest is a bad thing because it gets in the way of the wealth-creating buccaneers.

As McCreevy swaggered before an audience of bankers and developers in 2005, “Many of us in this room are from the generations that had the luck to grow up before governments got working and lawyers got rich on regulating our lives. We were part of the ‘unregulated generation’ – the generation that has produced some of the best risk-takers, problem-solvers and inventors. We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility and we learned how to deal with them all.”

Funny, isn't it, that those who decried the nanny state now claim that they messed up because nanny wasn't strict enough

The word that leaps out here is, of course, “responsibility”. The big fallacy of this ideology was that it was the bankers and developers who were the “risk-takers”, when all along it was the rest of us, the mugs who were never told that, while the rewards of success would go to those inside the system, the costs of failure were entirely our responsibility.

This truth was brought home to us in the bank bailout: ordinary citizens were, all along, the invisible and silent underwriters of financial risk. And it is being reinforced again now, as the postdated cheque for the long holiday from regulation has to be lodged.

The prevailing attitude among those involved in the mica shambles seems to be that if they screw up and do shoddy work, it’s all the State’s fault. The government is to blame for not forcing them to deliver the goods and services they were paid for.

This is pretty much what Tom Parlon, director general of the Construction Industry Federation (and himself a minister for state in the government that oversaw much of this debacle), said on RTÉ radio last week.

He suggested that, as things are now, “you’re obliged through all your paperwork that every item that you put into a house or any construction project is fully certified. But that wasn’t the case at the time.” So the builders were not responsible for the quality of the materials they used because the law did not oblige them to be.

So what happened to rugged individualism? Funny, isn’t it, that those who decried the nanny state now claim that they messed up because nanny wasn’t strict enough.

You've heard of disaster capitalism: we practice a system of disaster communism. Here's your share of the damage, comrade

If I buy some fish from the supermarket and it turn out to be rotten, the State may be culpable for not enforcing food safety regulations. But does the supermarket therefore have no responsibility to give me edible fish in the first place, or to replace the bad goods it sold me?

Why are bad concrete blocks so different to bad fish? What about the responsibilities of the companies that produced those ruinous goods? What about the banks that gave mortgages for the houses they were used to build and who were supposed to assure themselves that the properties were worth at least the value of the loan?

What about the insurance companies that insured those mortgages? There’s not much sign of any of them in the hills of Donegal now.

Is there any such thing as private enterprise in Ireland? Only, it seems, when the bookies are paying out the winnings. All the beaten dockets are collective property.

You’ve heard of disaster capitalism: we practice a system of disaster communism. Here’s your share of the damage, comrade.

We are about to embark on a massive house-building programme that depends very heavily on a private construction sector that has some excellent builders and some champions of Hibernian Shoddy. We should at least be told whether the old unwritten rules still apply.

Will the fitness for purpose of all of these new houses be, in effect, the responsibility of the taxpayer? Is that bill in the post for the near future? If so, should the public that guarantees these houses not at least own them too?