Dr Michael Punch of the School of Sociology UCD analyses how as a society we got to where we are and how we might do something better.
What’s the mystery?… What’s the secret? …. What happened?” Many would sympathise in these times with the angry bewilderment expressed by Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, as his prospects and the basis of his self-worth collapsed around him. Irish society is now experiencing its own material and psychological crisis, as the economy lurches from a period of explosive growth to collapse and uncertainty.
The economic expansion was widely celebrated, and certainly improvements in employment, tax returns, and incomes were all welcome changes from the drab years of mass unemployment and emigration.
But there were also deeply worrying trends. Inequalities in society remained or widened. Lifestyles for many became increasingly rushed and busy with little room for family life and no time to stop and think. Maybe something went astray in the wider culture too. Perhaps, to paraphrase Anthony de Mello SJ, we drained all our energy pursuing something ultimately worthless, equating happiness with the acquisition of possessions and money.
Reasons for concern are abundant when we examine the boom in housing. Completion rates reached record levels in 2006, yet prices increased enormously, housing need and homelessness escalated and home ownership became unaffordable for even middle-income earners.
Some did manage to purchase, but only by taking on burdensome and unsustainable debts on properties far from the workplace. Others required the help of ‘gifts’ from parents – who themselves re-mortgaged to finance support of their children’s struggle to ‘get into home ownership’ – at any and all costs. This heralded a new lifestyle – hardly freely chosen – of pre-dawn rising, long commutes, and a need for dual incomes to survive. The right to enter the labour market is happily open to all, but the right to stay at home and raise a family has been all but lost, traded away on the cultural tide of borrow and spend – get into debt, buy things, be happy.
Households priced out of ownership and unable to get into the neglected social housing sector either stayed in the parental home or ventured into private rental. Rents are volatile in this sector and the better properties too expensive for those on minimum or even average incomes. Many doubled up in overcrowded accommodation to compensate or put up with illegal sub-standard flats or bedsits.
There remains also the harsher reality of survival on the margins on housing waiting lists, in homeless shelters, emergency accommodation or on the streets. Everyone needs and deserves an opportunity to make a home, find a place in the world to live and to be. The material and social costs of housing deprivation are obviously damaging to people and communities – one of the worst indictments of the extremes of inequality in our Punch society – but so are the unseen psychological and cultural scars. The lived experience of being on the edge, apparently unvalued, is a soul-destroying reality for a significant and increasing minority. Boom or bust, it doesn’t make much difference on the margins – the familiar hardships grind along, the struggle scarcely changes. It’s a fate you can only pray won’t ever be yours, but for the unlucky ones, it’s just daily life.
There were other even more curious realities unfolding that took on an air of normality – just the way things are. The financial institutions adopted exceptionally flexible lending practices, oiling the machinery of borrowing and spending and promoting indebtedness as a way of life, something to be pursued, never questioned. Outlandish sums passed hands for sites. The extraordinary increases in house prices bore no relation to the actual building costs. Speculative activity mushroomed, encouraged by tax incentives and a low rate of capital gains tax on investor properties.
The oddest result of all of this was that, at a time of great housing need and unaffordability, over 41 per cent of new houses were acquired as investments or second homes, so that now at least 250,000 properties nationwide lie empty. It seems the real meaning of housing as a home got lost in the indulgent and wasteful treatment of this most valuable resource as a commodity for capital accumulation.
A vision from Scripture?
I believe there is a case now to re-examine our values and development vision in the light of social theology. Scripture is in ways radically social – its message lives in human history and speaks to the conditions of our lives here and now. It presents a vision for how we should relate to one another and sets out a direct and practical claim on how we understand our lives and order our social affairs.
We might take as a starting point something from the life and humanity of Jesus. Notice, for example, his preferential option for the vulnerable (the proclamation of the Kingdom of God as good news for the poor), concern to know and respond to people’s deepest and most urgent needs, desire for human flourishing (have life and have it to the full, Jn 10:10) and persistent challenge to the structures of power that marginalised and stigmatised.
And in doing so, he followed consciously in the prophetic tradition that demands a conversion in individuals and society. This is the tradition of Isaiah that seeks to lift up the lowly and urges a metanoia (conversion, change of heart) in our values and ways of being. As the beautiful reading from the Easter Vigil (Is 55.2) puts it: ‘Why spend your money for that which is not bread? Why labour for something that does not satisfy?’ It’s a message that got buried in the culture of the boom and bust years, which turned housing into a commodity more than a home.
What’s needed then is an alternative value system that can underpin an authentic and people-centred development model geared to ensure that everyone can acess a home in sustainable communities and a living environment. Getting there will require courageous and innovative policies. However, the first necessary step is a revolution in values, something that scripture has long suggested.
This article first appeared in The Messenger (September 2009), a publication of the Irish Jesuits.
A Report by the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice (JCFJ) with Dr Michael Punch, The Irish Housing System: Vision, Values, Reality,
is available at €6 from Messenger Publications, Tel: 01.6767491, www.messenger.ie
