Mark O'Connell: The housing crisis could erode Ireland’s middle class to a point of collapse
For all our problems as a country (struggling healthcare system, growing numbers of homeless, absurd cost of living) there is some cause for pride in our status as one of only a small number of western nations where the far right has so far failed to gain any kind of serious electoral foothold. These people make a lot of noise, certainly – whipping up hysteria about immigration, committing arson and other forms of violent intimidation – but none of it has translated to anything like a coherent or potent political movement. Some of this can probably be accounted for by the obvious lack of political talent among their ranks, although it must be acknowledged that the parties we routinely elect to power in this country are not, themselves, exactly overrun with great and charismatic statesmen. There is also the fact that an Irish far right, unlike its counterparts in other English-speaking countries, is in no position to draw on the usual reservoirs of reactionary nostalgia. No one is going to get elected with a promise to “make Ireland great again”, because the closest thing we have to a cultural memory of a lost imperial grandeur is Italia 90. But if and when the far right does come to gain significant ground in this country, it will be because it has been able to effectively exploit a disaster created by the parties of the coalition government, and compounded over many long years of political inaction. The housing crisis in this country has been so dire for so long that it feels conceptually mistaken to even refer to it as a crisis, as though it were some kind of dangerous inflection point, beyond which lay the risk of potential disaster. The disaster is our everyday reality, and has been for some years now.And that disaster is, primarily, generational. Just 7 per cent of people aged 25-39 own a home. That already appalling statistic is compounded by the fact that rents are climbing faster than at any time over the past two decades, with the national monthly average for newly advertised properties having recently exceeded €2,000. Unsurprisingly, given this situation, according to the most recent figures from the CSO, 41 per cent of those aged 18-34 live at home with their parents. [ A key social housing scheme is in danger of falling apart. Why?Opens in new window ]There is no question that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, who between them have run the Republic since independence, are to blame for this situation. Even if they had the will to address it – and were not ideologically averse to doing so by building social housing, rather than pumping public money in to the bank accounts of landlords – the prospect of any kind of meaningful improvement during the lifetime of this Government would be vanishingly small: the measures necessary to tackle a disaster of this scale involve the kind of long-term planning, in terms of labour and infrastructure, that the Coalition parties have never shown any serious intention to undertake. There are, of course, people who benefit from the ever-increasing value of property, and the entirely dysfunctional rental market. Quite a few of those people are TDs, and many more are in positions of power and influence in the country. But even people who own their own homes, or who otherwise stand to benefit from rising property values, have to live in this society, among other people; they, too, have to live with the social consequences of this disaster. One of these consequences may be that the Coalition’s middle-class voter base erodes to the point of collapse. The prospect we face in this country is that of a middle-class incapable of reproducing, from one generation to the next, the social conditions – property ownership in particular – necessary for its own existence.Far-right movements have historically been very effective at profiting from this kind of social crisis, at exploiting widespread fear of status loss. Writing about the fundamental characteristics of fascism, the Italian writer Umberto Eco argued that it always “springs from individual or social frustration, which explains why one of the characteristics typical of historic Fascist movements was the appeal to the frustrated middle classes, disquieted by some economic crisis or political humiliation, and frightened by social pressure from below.” (And fascism is, among other things, a response to crises created by the inherent instabilities of capitalism. It is no coincidence that the rise of right-wing populism in Europe and the US followed the great financial crisis of 2008, and the long years of recession that came in its wake.) [ Power struggles, resignations and Conor McGregor’s toxicity: The fracturing of Ireland’s far rightOpens in new window ]The far right have precisely one solution to offer to a problem like this housing disaster: blame the immigrants, who are the cause of almost all our social ills, and whose preferential treatment by the Government is at the cost of the impoverishment and indignity of the true – which is to say, native – Irish.As Balakrishnan Rajagopal, the UN’s special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, put it in an interview last year: “Far-right parties prosper when they can exploit the social gaps that emerge out of underinvestment and inadequate government planning, and when they can blame outsiders.” The irony here, of course, is that placing the blame for the housing crisis on outsiders does the government an unintentional favour, in that it distracts attention away from the actual causes. The scapegoating impulse that drives almost all far-right movements diverts anger about real social problems away from the powerful people at fault, and toward the powerless people in society.It’s a profound insult to our national dignity that so many people, in this supposedly wealthy country, no longer feel they have any prospect of owning their own home. It’s an even deeper insult that so many have been driven into homelessness – by a lack of social housing, by ever-increasing rents and by the effects of poverty. On its own terms, this is a social disaster that demands an urgent response; the longer it continues to unfold, the deeper the damage will be to our future. In terms of the opportunity it presents to the far right, it may well prove more disastrous still.
