The Second Star to the Right

On Ireland's homing condition, and the children who will not forgive us

“Dignity | Courage | Happiness” by Rodrigue Semabia“

Several years ago, while living in Boston, I started writing a bi-weekly column for The Currency. I can’t remember what they called me then; a “disruption and innovation” columnist perhaps. You see, I had written a piece for the Irish Times shortly before that — my first ever public writing in Ireland, which condemned the FDI model and reliance on tech companies — and Stephen Kinsella, Chief Economist at The Currency, read it.

When he first asked if I would like to write a column for The Currency, I turned the idea down. “The only thing people want to read about in Ireland is housing”, I told him. Indeed, flicking through any of the national papers of record, that’s all I could see. Housing, housing, housing. “And I have”, I admitted, “nothing to say about housing”. He told me I could write about whatever I wanted — housing or not — and so I agreed.

Truth be told, I found it pathetic that the Irish imagination had not moved past endless housing discussions; having lived in the US for so long, how could I relate or take an interest in such insular-isms? Surely, if people cared that much about it, it would have been solved by now?

I swore to myself I would never write about housing; that I would never reduce my imagination to that level. Weren’t there so many larger questions to ask, and so many more interesting systems to understand? Housing, surely, is a problem that consumes a small imagination: of endlessly counted units, rental prices, parochial squabbles over planning permissions and greediness over square feet — all the while, mistaking the dirty management of scarcity for the alchemy of politics.

And, perhaps most arrogantly of all, I thought I had escaped it. But I had not.

Because 5,600 children have spent this summer in emergency accommodation in Ireland. Meaning that thousands of children live in single hotel rooms with their parents and siblings. Little girls who try to eat, sleep, do homework, fight, cry, and maintain the congruence of a normal life within four walls that were designed for a business travel who stays for two nights. Little boys who do not eat a home-cooked meal as there is only a microwave, and who cannot play as there is no garden. There is the child who learns instinctively to be ashamed of where they live; of lying and making excuses to not invite friends over after school.

And these numbers? They don’t even take into consideration the children that are sleeping in cars, or being shuffled between the couches of people they have never met, or in Direct Provision centers even though they have been accepted into the country, because there’s nowhere else to go.

I had been shamefully wrong all this time. I have not escaped this fraught topic, and neither have you. Because in a society in which even one child is homeless, the rest of us do not have the permission to declare ourselves outside of the problem.

There Is No Housing Crisis

So, are we in a housing crisis?

Before we can start to answer this question, we have to ask what we even mean by a housing crisis — a term that occupies every headline, every conversation, and every election. It’s used so often that it has become self-explanatory; a phrase that has grown so large that it now contains the state, the private sector, the grimy developers, evil landlords, increasingly poor tenants, the ghost of the Celtic Tiger, and the despair of the future. The Housing Crisis™ — a term that in addition to telling us what is wrong with our country, also suggests where we have come from, while hinting at the direction of where we might be going — as though, because we’ve said the phrase often enough, we somehow arrive at having a shared understanding of both.

But a crisis is, by definition, some sort of temporary disruption to a system that otherwise functions pretty well. For example, a heart attack is a crisis, just like the collapse of the Irish banking system in 2008, Covid, and Storm Éowyn tearing through the country are crises. These are unique events taking place such that normal life is disrupted, before extraordinary measures are taken so that the system can begin to function again.

Again: does Ireland have a housing crisis? No. Ireland has a housing condition.

A condition is very different to a crisis, because unlike a crisis, it is not some sort of unknowable intervention that suddenly interrupts a system that is otherwise healthy; it is a persistent state of the system itself. While a heart attack is a crisis that requires rapid intervention, heart disease is a condition; an outcome of an underlying system that will not change until the complex web of the environment that led to it fundamentally changes too.

And the difference between a crisis and a condition, for housing, is a human one. Ultimately, it is the difference between the two types of lives that we make possible for the children of Ireland. Between building a system in which a little boy or girl can grow up knowing where they will sleep, or exhausting ourselves, year after year, responding to the endless symptoms of a problem we never properly confronted.

One of these outcomes — the one we are currently living — does nothing but ensure that another generation grows up dreaming of the lives we told them were theirs, only for them to discover that we did not give them the foundations upon which to build them.

But even if Ireland were in the midst of a housing crisis (which it is not), the task at hand would be relatively simple: to intervene rapidly, to stabilize the system, and to return it to normal so that we can get back to doing what we were doing before.

Which asks the next question: what, exactly, could be considered “normal” for Ireland?

Consider for a moment that what we are now mislabeling as a “crisis” is in fact the latest episode in a long daisy-chain of historically failed temporary solutions to permanent problems; with each of these solutions themselves creating the next crisis, and with none of these solutions actually creating anything that is capable of sustaining the current generation’s needs, let alone the next.

A brief reminder of where we’ve been:

Before independence, Irish people were housed as an outcome of colonial subjugation — they were tenants on their own land, having to rent their livelihoods and identities from foreign landlords they had never met. Then along came the famine, which was essentially a British government policy of mass eviction of the island. Following this, the Land Acts were the first glimpses of Irish political agency that we saw — and sadly, I suspect, the last; of giving Irish people the right to ownership of the same ground that had stood beneath them throughout multiple generations.

And after so long of this land being a tool of unprecedented power, dispossession and sheer humiliation, land ownership came to mean so much more than just being housed. In fact, at this point it stopped being thought of in terms of being a “government policy” but the central vein of the emotional architecture of the new state. Thus, housing had entered an era of being a deeply political project; wedging itself far into the Irish psyche. A house became analogous with life; to an Irish person’s belonging, security, and hopes for multi-generational independence. A home was a sense of ownership in the country that had been hard fought for, in a bid to make one’s own. It was nothing short of being a trophy of survival, in the most literal and human sense.

And here we see the aftermath of Irish independence — but with a cruel irony. Because the ability for the state to house somebody (or not) had increasingly dire implications. You see, while the denial of housing was once an external enemy, imposed by the apparatus of colonial rule, post-independence brought the realization that the obstruction to belonging was now us. We had now somehow become the people standing between ourselves and a home.

As a result, there was mass emigration, and the population fell to the lowest since the famine — from 4.4 million in 1926 to 2.8 million by 1961, meaning that the housing condition was “solved”, yes, but only indirectly, because the un-housed removed themselves completely so that the solution could form. Meaning that before independence, you could live in Ireland but you had to belong to Britain; however afterwards you could belong to Ireland but you had to live in Britain.

Eventually, there was a second rising of the Irish state in the 1950’s to 1980’s whereby the government rolled up its sleeves and local authorities built up to 7,000 homes a year. Whilst still being seen as a political project, though, its dependence on annual budgets and the comings-and-goings of political will meant that when a fiscal crisis arrived in the 80’s, the building of houses stopped, and the people who could build the houses left, once again.

The 1990’s onwards created a state architecture that we have come to recognize as our contemporary one; in which the state rolled down its sleeves and withdrew from public life, while handing housing — along with anything else it could find — to the private market, private ownership, private development and private finance. The role of the Irish government here was limited to subsidizing the nooks and crannies that the so-called markets couldn’t reach; and the Celtic Tiger made this seem like a genius plan from a genius political class, until the crash uncovered it to be the madness that it was.

However, the underlying premise that the state’s role was to do little more than facilitate payments between an increasingly complex web of private market players, survived the boom and bust — and has become enshrined in government operating policy today.

So before we even resume the endless mud-slinging task of arguing about how to fix this so-called crisis, we should ask a more pertinent question: which version of normal do we wish to go back to, exactly? Did we prefer the colonial tenancy or the mass migration? What about bringing back that short-lived building scheme that was too politically fragile to survive then, but this time with Simon Harris running it?

Because let’s face it: Ireland has never had a housing “normal” that produced anything normal; our so-called housing policies amounted to little more than a haphazard series of ill-thought out improvisations, with each one evolving into the next.

What we need to do, then, is not to return to normal, because this doesn’t exist, and perhaps not even to attempt to simply build more houses — because a housing condition cannot be solved by treating housing as an isolated problem. Instead, we must increase our tolerance for discomfort and force ourselves to look at the problem in its entirety; to widen our gaze away from just a house and to inspect the rotten system more deeply in which our badly built houses are only the tip of the iceberg: the missing infrastructure, broken transport, low wages, non-existent indigenous economies, and most importantly — the toxic relationship between the state and the market.

In other words, if we want a different housing outcome, we have to build a different system that could possibly allow us to produce one. We must build a “normal” that is, for Ireland, highly abnormal.

Meet Me Where the Wild Things Grow

“Meet me where the wild things grow” by Edith Torony

So now let’s look at what happens when a government faced with a housing condition — and no experience of ever building anything — tries to fix it with nothing but capital expenditure:

It spends €11.8 billion in a single year to make the problem worse.

This number, derived from a Business Post report last week, represents the cost of the Irish state’s sprawl of more than forty distinct programs, schemes and subsidies — all of dance around a specific symptom of the condition I have just described, while not going anywhere near addressing the actual problem itself.

Of the ~€12 billion, nearly half a billion goes to the HAP scheme, which is essentially just a subsidy paid from the people who can’t afford to buy houses, to the people who own too many houses (landlords); a scheme which has already enriched this same group by over €4 billion since the program started — and which amounted to not a single house being built, while only making the existing houses more expensive for the people it was trying to help. Then there is around €250 million in Help to Buy grants, which is captured by the developers while also raising the price of a house by the same amount of the grant. And then the endless tax reductions, VAT shenanigans, corporate incentives, capital loans, equity funds and more — each with its own eligibility criteria, enormous administrative architecture and constituency of beneficiaries; and none of which include home buyers.

Finally, there’s around €4 billion that is spent by the semi-state bodies in Ireland. Did any of this money build houses? Of course not. It financed the private development of homes, through private fund structures, at private market prices. And at the end of this, the state owned nothing new. We, the taxpayer, were worse off.

I have before called this the Failure Premium: the surcharge that the government pays because it has never built the institutions that can actually deliver services itself. It is the outsourcing of not only the tasks of a functioning government, but of being a real government. It is also the transfer of enormous amounts of taxpayer money to the person who holds the asset that the state is trying to produce; making the taxpayer pay twice — first for the subsidy to the asset holder, then for the rise in prices of the underlying asset.

But the Failure Premium is not just a transfer of money, it is a transfer of meaning.

And sadly, nobody talks about meaning in Irish public policy; of identity and beauty and dignity. They talk about housing in technical terms. It is an obsession with quantity — how many — but never about quality — how good.

This obsession, when followed to its natural endpoint, suggests that the only important metric is that four walls and a roof might exist, but never that it can become a home that is worthy of whomever might end up living in it. And while many people may have tried to convince you otherwise, beauty is not a luxury that is for other people. It is for us.

In most simple terms, it is the very thing that indicates that someone — perhaps a person that we will never even meet! — once thought that you mattered.

Think about the fact that planting a single tree on a concrete-jungled footpath is an absurdly optimistic and brave act, and the tree is beautiful for this miracle alone. Because the person who planted it knows that its benefits will belong fully to somebody else, and in a future they won’t necessarily be a part of.

A tree says:

You.

Yes, you — the person who might be here in twenty, forty, or eighty years from now. I have imagined that you might one day walk along here; perhaps feeling tired, or sad, or even carrying a child of your own in weary arms, and that you might want somewhere beautiful to sit. So I planted this tree for you, before I even knew you would have a name.

Public spaces have the opportunity to be profoundly important acts of care; they are a physical interpretation of an increasingly vanishing type of devotion; a dedication that is extended through time and that sets the minimum standard of how we should value ourselves and each other.

Now think about a well-designed street and what that might speak to our communities. Perhaps that someone imagined your life before your parents even existed, and they wondered about where you might walk, whether you would feel safe in doing that, or whether there would be a place for your child to play. And a house — nay, a home — that is well-designed with natural light? This says that someone, somewhere, believed you are worth the effort of getting this right, and that the years you might spend inside its walls are deserving of peace and happiness.

To build anything well is an act of faith about people you will never meet and to believe that there is a future that is worth inheriting. Civilization is, through this lens, little more than accumulation of evidence: trees full of chorus-singing birds, parks full of children that become captains of pirate ships, libraries full of worlds that we could not otherwise imagine. An accumulation of the delightfully strange things that humans make, and that we cannot bear might leave with us. Public spaces show that one generation cared enough about another to ensure that beauty, care and hope were left behind.

But ugliness says the opposite:

You’ll take what we give you, and don’t bother complaining about it, because you’ve already asked for too much.

And Ireland is ugly. Not everywhere of course, but wherever we have been given the opportunity to insert ugliness, we have ensured it is there.

The paint peeling off derelict houses; bollards vomited all over the streets; retail parks thrown next to roundabouts; houses built as cheaply as possible so they can be sold for as much as possible; buildings designed by engineers instead of architects; derelict shops; streets built for cars and not people; houses scattered across fields randomly, so that children can’t walk or get the bus to school; concrete walls; endless plastic signage; car parks where town centers should be; dereliction; patched-up tarmac; weeds pushing through crumbling sidewalks; more dereliction; roads that are too narrow for one lane, let alone two; litter stuck between steel railings; even more dereliction; public spaces designed with such hostility so that nobody wants to be in them; endless landscapes that could be beautiful but have been derelicted into hellscapes.

And this is not a matter of money or wealth, because doesn’t Ireland have a higher GDP than Vienna, whose social housing is not just affordable but architect-designed with pride? Hidden inside every self-congratulatory headline is a government that overtly says that it is winning, while the subliminal message we see through our built communities has never been clearer: your experience of this country is not what matters, because you do not matter.

I have long obsessed over aesthetics, for reasons that extend far beyond how something looks — because it is in this carelessness where the housing condition stops being about buildings and starts being about who we are, as a people.

Tea-Stained Indignity

Ireland’s housing condition and its beauty (or lack thereof) are connected through the very word “crisis” itself.

For the very simple reason that the type of solutions an emergency provokes are also the ugliest. Crises give us direct provision centers, because in an “emergency” you requisition whatever derelict or inappropriate property is available while pretending you’ll worry about quality when the “emergency” is over; a time which has yet to arrive. They give us decades of similarly ill-concocted “emergency” accommodation. They gave us HAP, through the same “emergency” that enabled the state to throw money at every available program it could muster up, judging its success by how much the state spent instead of how much it built.

And all of these temporary solutions have somehow become permanently ugly fixtures in Irish life. Because in a crisis, nobody dare embarrass themselves by asking for beauty. What nerve! To contemplate architectural taste when people are sleeping in cars. How selfish of you!

But I want to linger on direct provision, if I may; a system whose cruelty I have written about before. Because this program did not arise from a crisis at all, even though we talk about it as such. This was a deliberately designed policy that was knowingly implemented. Michael McDowell, the Minister for Justice whose term oversaw its creation, openly discussed the reasoning for making Ireland a designed-to-be-unattractive place for those seeking asylum on the public record. He did not merely tolerate its cruel conditions — he designed them.

And then what happened? We allowed this indignity to become normal by turning blind eyes and by not questioning what is obviously morally wrong. But here’s the problem with the only thing the Irish state ever designed well; this inhumanity — it bleeds into everything else around it. It is spilt tea on a tablecloth, seeping outwards and staining everything it touches.

You see, if a society can create a system whereby the dignity of housing for one group of people is denied, then the standard for what this society will tolerate elsewhere becomes permanently lowered, through a slow and corrosive acceptance that inhumanity is an acceptable outcome from our political class.

So while we have built an enormous amount of our national memory based on the humiliation at the hands of another government, perhaps that memory is not long enough to remind us of what humiliation feels like, when we are the ones inflicting it.

Is it surprising that we have ended up here, though? And I am not asking this question rhetorically — this is a question that I wish to be answered. Because this normalization has corrupted us to our very core. If so-called emergency accommodation can last for twenty-five years for asylum seekers, then why not allow “temporary” portakabin classrooms to last for forty years for our children? Did anybody notice that we converted holiday camps for those fleeing war? No? Great, then hopefully nobody will notice when we put our most frail on trolleys in hospital corridors, to languish as their privacy is treated as an administrative burden. What I’m trying to say is this: if the state can look at one group of people and decide that they deserve neither beauty nor the architecture of a dignified life, then it becomes easier and easier to make the same decision about the next group. Homeless people? Clear their tents away and erect barriers to ensure a public punishment for trying to do the one thing that is most human of all — have somewhere to sleep. The little boys and girls with nowhere to wash their school uniforms? Shhhh don’t talk about them.

In these pieces, I often write that we do not, despite a century having passed since Irish independence, know who we are. But at a certain stage, “what we do” will fill that void to become “who we are”; because in lieu of having made a conscious decision about what we want with our country, our identity has been built by the residues of what the state has done, and what it endlessly fails to do.

It is therefore becoming increasingly difficult to tell ourselves that we are a people who simply haven’t decided who we are yet. No — at this stage, it is nearly impossible to deny what we are; that we are a people who do not build what we need, who do not insist on beauty in our lives, who do not demand dignity for ourselves or the vulnerable around us, and who do not know what any of this is for. Where is the evidence that we are more than this? That we believe human respect is not conditional? Or that we believe children deserve somewhere to grow up?

I’ll ask again: where is the evidence?

I keep desperately looking for it, and increasingly cannot find it.

“Where are you from?”

Ok, so everything I have told you so far is admittedly a lie. Ireland is not in a perpetual housing condition, it is in a homing condition.

A house is a collection of four walls and a roof; but a home is the relentless exhaustion of newborn children amidst the screams of fighting siblings while the dog is scratching at the door; a home is an asylum that plays out on the kitchen floor which is wettened by the grief-struck tears of having loved and lost, amidst the smell of a dinner that someone lovingly wanted you to have.

A house is a structure. But a home is a life that happens within it.

Look, Ireland has always been a country that people leave. When confronted with the statistics of Ireland’s youth taking their ambitions and talents elsewhere, the usual commentators remark, with considerable nonchalance, that young people have always left, but that they will always return. This was true of the famine ships, the American wakes, and the Christmas-time reporting from the Dublin Airport arrivals foyer. The entirety of Ireland’s emotional architecture and our perception of who we are as a people, is based on the cyclicality of leaving and eventually returning, generation after generation.

As they say — the Irish don’t invade; they infest.

As a lifelong emigrant myself — and I suspect that those who are reading from far-flung corners of the diaspora will similarly attest to — the pain of emigration is not just leaving your country, but leaving your home. The sadness that comes with the loss of an inanimate object — a kitchen table — which saw you drinking tea on a Sunday morning while dissecting the night before; crying about lost boyfriends, and wearing paper-thin crowns from Christmas crackers. That longing never leaves, even if you do. But as a lot of fellow-leavers will also confirm, that pain is numbed somewhat because there is an unspoken promise between the leaver and the country being left. That your home will still be there, and the place that shaped and molded you will remain intact.

Well, the state has broken that promise. Because to come home, you need somewhere to come home to.

And here the lost dreams of returning home collide with the lost capital within the Failure Premium. Leaving Harvard Yard, I had no idea that Dublin wouldn’t have anywhere to put me. I can only assume the teachers coming from Dubai who can’t find a school to teach in, feel the same. Two million people, in fact, carry this notion of home in their heads, only for the penny to drop — and always too late — that there is no place for them anymore; the place they had relentlessly clung to has moved on without them. That they will find themselves exiled, spending decades abroad telling themselves that they will never be from “there”, before realizing that they are no longer from “here” either.

And while confronting this exile, they must further confront this fact:

Despite €11.8 billion being spent on the housing crisis solutions, there is no place for them to rediscover what they left.

Because while Ireland needs to build houses — it needs to build so much more. It needs to build a reason for people to come back, and a place for them to do that. And that reason is not an Eircode or a HAP cheque.

A reason to return to a place that is worth belonging to is a place where you can show your foreign partner — who has unconvincingly moved home with you from fairer weathered places — the pitches where you used to play Saturday matches, or the golf club whose gates you used to jump to go secretly drinking at night. It’s a place where “where are you from” has a semblance of meaning even after having left, and even after the old man who was always sitting at the end of the bar, whose name you never even knew, but was a permanent fixture and whom you always thought would always “just be there”, is gone.

Because for an emigrant, the question of where are you from? is definitional to your entire sense of self — the only way of knowing which way is up, in a world which otherwise seems to be mostly inside-out. You clutch at it with white-knuckled fingers, and defend it ruthlessly.

I’ve seen people spend twenty years in Boston, London or Melbourne, and still be able to answer precisely where they’re from in Ireland without ever detailing the specifics of geography. These people might build careers in far-flung places, raise children who grow up saying “mom” instead of “mam”, marry a person who has never heard of the GAA, and acquire new passports; but they can only do this as long as the place they come from — whatever combination of things makes up that idea — remains real to them while they are away. That these things will be waiting for them, if and when they are ready to find them again.

But for the centuries that Ireland was defined by the happenings of those who left it, it is now also a country that people choose to come to; emigrants from other places. And it doesn’t know how to be that. The state has no institutional capacity to receive those who have already left, never mind those who are coming for the first time.

In a way, our identity as emigrants has collided violently with our newer and growing identity of being against immigration. And at the center of this is that the “infrastructure of belonging” was never imagined, let alone built. Meaning that new people arrive into the same nothingness that the returners end up facing; both groups of people looking at each other and thinking: surely this can’t be it? So after decades of refusing to build anything, the state manages to even shock itself into finding that, at the heart of this nation, there is not only a structural emptiness, but an emotional and cultural one too — and all at its own doing.

This is why the housing and homing conditions cannot be separated from the immigration question, or from the identity question, or from the question of what Ireland is building, whether it is beautiful, and for whom. These are all the same questions.

Small Problems That Become Grownups

“Safe inside the hug” by Sara Milojevic

And so here we are, a country spending billions of euros every year to produce enriched landlords and homelessness. A country whose own revolution was predicated on willing to kill and be killed for the right to stay on your own land, and yet that cannot provide a home to a child. A country that designed cruelty for asylum seekers, and then watched — with nothing short of complete indifference — when that cruelty bled into every other part of our civic life.

So often, after I write one of these pieces, I receive emails, texts, and messages in which I am asked: So what are the solutions? What would you do? How would you fix it?

Give us the fucking plan, Sinead.

But how do you fix a propensity for inhumanity?

Look, there are thousands of children in emergency accommodation tonight, as I type this, listening to strangers screaming at each other through paper-thin walls, while eating microwaved dinners. All of this will shape the adults they become, and hence the votes they cast, before ultimately changing the country they inherit.

So yes, here’s what the political class has not yet understood: those children will eventually grow up.

And they, like me, will have questions of their own that they want to be answered. Like: why did you let this happen? Why did you call it a crisis when you had decades to fix it but didn’t? Why did you keep moving us from room to room instead of building somewhere for us to live?

And: Why did you make us feel ashamed of something that was never our fault?

Until one day, they will understand the most devastating part of this whole homing condition: that you and I — we all knew. We all knew that rents were too high; that private developers only care about their margins; that the IPAS centers were equally traumatic as the danger being fled; that homes were not built aligned with regulations. And that we did it all, anyway.

And I will tell you one thing that is the god’s honest truth. That when these children grow up, they will not forgive the ministers who stood on podiums, smiling at cameras, wooing the media with their glossy reports about high life expectancies in Ireland. How can they feel anything other than pure, unadulterated rage when they realize it was the Taoiseach who remarked that the fiscal surplus was a “good problem to have” while they shared a bathroom with strangers? That it was the Minister for Housing who said that the state “cannot provide every home”, as if the state provided them any home at all, despite €12 billion euros of taxpayer money being set alight in aid of such a cause?

They won’t forgive this political class, and you know what? I’m getting to the stage where neither will I. This gross, disgusting, grubby, smirking incompetence has gone too fucking far. How do you do all of this ceremonial performance of pretending to govern a country, when a child in your constituency is doing their homework on a hotel bed, for the seventeenth night in a row? How do you sleep at night, when 5,600 children do not?

I do not understand this, and believe me that I have tried.

I have looked extensively at the system, the incentives, the bottlenecks, the policies, the path dependencies and the structural explanations for this mess. I have built the frameworks and drawn the diagrams of the dynamics involved. And not one single piece of analysis, nor a single structural insight, explains how an adult within the power of government can know that thousands of children are homeless and yet still choose, every single day, to keep fueling the very system that keeps them that way.

The structural explanation, of course, is that these outcomes will be the same regardless of who is at the helm of this rotted system; and I believe this to be true. But the structural explanation doesn’t recuse the people at the helm from the moral obligation to do something about it. You are not absolved by the fact that Ireland’s institutional apparatus to build houses is broken; but you are indicted by your failure to thus rebuild it.

Ireland has spent over a hundred years not being able to decide who it is or what it stands for. Yet it has also filled that void with whatever the state has done, or chosen to forego doing. And its track record has not aged well — it has exported its people, facilitated ugliness, designed total cruelty, and done so while spending twelve billion euros a year to make damned sure that the children of this nation are not cherished equally, despite the promise of the 1916 Proclamation.

We have been living with this chronic homing and housing condition for more than a century, and still one hundred years later we are still completely, wholly, disgustingly indifferent to its effects. We have been blinded by the numbers of what is being built and what is not, without ever stopping — not for one, single moment — to ask ourselves if this is who we want to be.

In lieu of such introspection, and despite our vacant efforts to suggest otherwise, a country cannot be defined by what it says about itself — no matter how high the number of houses approved, the near-infinite schemes launched, and the fanatical, quasi-barbaric production of theatrical evidence that everything is going just as it were intended to.

At a certain point, we have to stop and ask ourselves: what the hell are we doing here?

Because if this political class has become so immune to its own indignity that it can gleefully oversee a system producing thousands of homeless children, while celebrating this as a job well done; and if it cannot conceive of the idea that beauty can exist in this country; if its collective imagination is so grossly shriveled, atrophied, and utterly hollowed out by decades of mistaking the act of wasting money for the act of governing, that it cannot even begin to imagine a world in which Irish children have a bed of their own to sleep in at night —

— then it needs to recuse itself from the job.

By which I mean these people need to exit themselves from the pretense in which what they are doing equates to governing, and that €11.8 billion of spending alongside self-congratulatory podium performances is the sign of a functioning country.

So if you truly cannot do this job, or you cannot fathom that the manner in which you are doing your job now is so inadequately being performed, then step aside for someone who can; so that a person who looks at this degenerated mess and feels a violent compulsion to tear the system apart in order to rebuild it from the ground up, can take your place.

I once thought that writing about housing was beneath me; a low-importance quarrel in which I had no interest. And I am deeply ashamed of that. That I took the most profound question a country can ask itself — can our people live here, in homes that are worthy of them — and mistook it for a small one. Most of all, that it took 5,600 children to not know where they thought they might sleep for me to realize that housing is not a topic from which any of us can escape.

And today, what’s worse is that I feel more shame about my years of indifference than this government appears to feel about its decades of failure.

If I were those children, I wouldn’t forgive us either.

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The Second Star To The Right

[Opening song to Peter Pan]

The second star to the right
Shines in the night for you
To tell you that the dreams you plan
Really can come true

The second star to the right
Shines with a light that's rare
And if it's Never Land you need
It's light will lead you there

Twinkle, twinkle little star
So I'll know where you are
Gleaming in the skies above
Lead me to the land we dream of

And when our journey is through
Each time we say "Goodnight"
We'll thank the little star that shines
The second from the right

Gleaming in the skies above
Lead me to the land we dream of

And when our journey is through
Each time we say "Goodnight"
We'll thank the little star that shines
The second from the right