First-time buyers and the Housing Fury

national | miscellaneous | news report Wednesday December 11, 2002 10:21 by Toner Quinn editor at thejmi dot com

How housing is out of control

This article was published in The Irish Times, Monday 18 November 2002

The Housing Fury
by Toner Quinn

A few weeks before the new millennium, myself and my girlfriend moved back to Ireland from Scotland. In our mid-twenties, and expecting our first child, we were tempted back by the thought of having family support and our friends around us. And at the back of our mind was all this talk of something called the Celtic Tiger, which we thought, at the very least, couldn’t do our chances any harm. For twelve months we lived in a room in my mother’s house, then – in a strike for independence – for two months in a miserable one-bedroom flat (at 580 punts a month), then six months minding my sister’s house while she was abroad, and since then we’re renting a two-bedroom house belonging to a relative, thus making it affordable. We have stopped looking to buy a house. We try to block out the subject. If it does surface in conversation, we inevitably circle around emigration as a solution.

On a scale of the fortunes of today’s young Irish, we are the lucky ones, simply because our family were in the position to bale us out. But that doesn’t mean I don’t feel enraged at the circumstances in which many young Irish find themselves. Leafing through property pages and seeing houses for d300,000 or more, and realising that your society implicitly expects you to try and purchase that house leaves one speechless. You try and reason that even an iota of business acumen would tell you it is not a smart move to invest when your salary is d20,000 to d30,000. But the older generation frown and tell you that it was the same when they were our age, that they too had to stretch themselves. But ten times or more your salary? The banks tell us you should be aiming towards 3.5 times your salary! We seem to be speaking completely different languages, and living in entirely different worlds.

Estate agents backed up by politicians, regularly stating that it is ‘a good time for first time buyers’, leave young people blank. The Government makes noises about social housing, but shows no real sense of urgency, certainly not equal to the panic that is out there. Their slavish following of the economics of the free market has shown up their staleness, their lack of imagination. Parents with their children still living at home because of housing prices showed incredible patience by voting this Government back in.
The young Irish are demonstrating fury at the abolishment of the d3,800 First Time Buyers Grant, but not purely because of the monetary loss. Their anger has been building up for years, and it is not only to do with housing. They have become weary of the conflicting messages that their society has been sending them. They are told they are educated and confident, and have the right to strive for much more in life, and yet they shouldn’t expect a home. They are told they are a generation who are imbued with a new confidence in their Irishness and their country, but they are still expected to be servile to the absolutes of the free market and understand that its demands on Ireland must come first.

Some young Irish rang up the Gerry Ryan radio show last Friday morning. They fumed and they screamed, but the chasm that exists between the generations was painfully evident. Gerry actually laughed. When you no longer feel the stress of having no home, no security, you quickly forget what it is like. The airwaves were seized by older home-owners giving out to the young for spending all their money on drink and not trying hard enough to buy a house. Again, the young Irish listening to this were speechless.

It is common for the older generation that rule the airwaves and the national newspapers to proclaim that all the stifling characteristics of Irish society have been swept away. But in exchange for sweeping away all that they hated as young people the ruling generation have bought into the absolute logic of the free market, and in the 1990s were in the perfect position to reap the benefits of it. Their houses are now worth fortunes. They can hardly be anything but delighted. But the young Irish haven’t seen those benefits of the free market. They see an Ireland led by brainlessness and naivety in the face of market economics. They are bewildered by the notion that the ruling generation think there is a future in all of this. The atrocious housing situation, whereby the young Irish have been priced out of the market to a degree that could never have been imagined, is only a symptom of a future in Ireland that the young are dreading, but that the older generation seem oblivious to.

Toner Quinn works in publishing in Dublin.