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Home by Eoin O'Brion. A review and some comments




Ireland has a home crisis, construed as a homelessness crisis.  O'Brion shows us what we already know, we inhabitants of this damp rock are pissing our last away in the teeth of squalor and growing out of damp dereliction.  Those who fail to cling on become The Homeless. The reason? Money can rest and gain value in The Land.  


In a delightful affectation, O'Brion's book is presented in Musical Movements, with the introduction being an Overture and the text divided into Three Movements.


O'Brion tells the tale of the radical idealism that founded the nascent state, of how the democratic programme of Dáil Éireann 1919 committed that the interests of private property must be subordinate to the public right and welfare.  It's a story of how solutions are bountiful, solutions created by and placed in our own communities. Yet at each step the lusty embrace between the monied interests and the political class colluded to subvert the public right and welfare.  There is no romanticism here, with O’Brion showing how our leaders have cultivated a long ignoble culture of corruption and cronyism.  


The problems of housing in Ireland are entirely systemic and until the perverse contingencies that perpetuate this system are addressed, nothing will fundamentally change.   Years ago in a pub in Dublin, I remember a friend of a friend, shrugging his shoulders and saying, 'Well, that's just money making money.' People with land, just watch their assets increase in value and that's just how it is.  It hadn't occurred to me that what he was describing was the inflation of a bubble, and bubbles invariably burst.


In 2017 I discovered a newly published book called 'Evicted. Poverty & Profit in the American City' by Matthew Desmond. We were then, as we are now gripped by a housing crisis and our media was presenting it as an Irish issue.  Homelessness isn't a uniquely Irish problem, it happens wherever banks are allowed to attach the other side of their balance sheets to property.


In the Ireland of the recent past, the prevailing doctrine was,  'The Market will do everything'. To go against this principle was like arguing with gravity and seldom did our discourse stray from this truism.  So today, it's seen as obvious as the whiteness of snow, that banks profit from the sale of mortgages and we pay.  


O'Brion argues for an alternative, we need to decouple land from the storage of wealth and view it as a common good. I just wish he did it with a little more pizzazz.  Sadly parts of the book are practically unreadable since they are as dull as the proverbial dishwater. I wanted this book to be better, but more than that I want O'Brion's vision to be realised, if only it were articulated a little better. 

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