Inflation and rising house prices are one thing, and we've sailed those waters before much to our detriment. But another issue is quality. There is none. You build shitty houses. They leak, they groan through the pipes and when someone uses the staircase next door you can hear them bounding up two steps at a time and how many plops into the toilet bowl they leave behind. At night it's even worse: when everyone's in bed, anyone getting up for a slash can be heard three doors down. The estates are hellish. Big ugly boxes, one after the next. Draughty windows, gaps in the door frames. Double glazing that isn't properly sealed and so the condensation builds up in the vacuum inside blocking the view in and out and the only way to get rid of it before it turns the wall surfaces mouldy is to replace it.
The lack of housing is one thing. The sheer numbers of empty and unfinished houses along the commuter belt and on the sink estates is like a magical mystery tour of the Ireland of the post-famine years. Occasional cottages dotted here and there and then these vast ghost estates looking like something out of a dystopian movie set. Filthy, garbage everywhere. Some houses ransacked for the copper pipes and remaining fittings like mantle pieces and kitchen press doors. No drainage, so the whole shit is waterlogged and dangerous.
I don't know how or why Paddy and Bridie put up with it. But they do, and they have done for over a century by now.
Paddy's a great builder when he has a gaffer and a building site. Without the gaffer on his back, Paddy would be showing up stinking of booze and too unstable to climb a scaffold. The gaffer knows Paddy's got a drinking problem so he keeps a good eye on him and checks everything he does before signing off on it. Compare that to where Paddy has no gaffer to answer to: that's how you got Jobstown, upper Ballyfermot, Clondalkin, Tallaght, Cabra, and out into county Dublin with all these new towns I never heard of when I lived there.
Clonee. That kip frightens the shite out of me. After ten at night there's nobody around. Not a sinner soul, as my Nanny was wont to say. Only big fuck off dogs that flip out when you walk anywhere down the street nearby. Damastown. Another sink estate packed full of grim. There's loads of them down around Cork and Limerick too. Kips, purpose built dives for the poor and needy. Otherwise you couldn't legally house a dog in it. The standards are so low they might as well be measure in the minus region.
Face it: you guys are pretty much crap at everything.
The one thing you can all do really well is moan and complain.
Look at the state of your lives? Adults still sleeping in the spare room. The good room too. Clapboard lean-to structures in the sideways and Barna buildings in the back garden with a family of five from Nigeria cooking on an open fire. Under the umbrellas as the rain pours down around them. Tents on the streets. Tents in the parks and along the canals. Sleeping bags and steel shutters on the high streets. Try walking around Dublin city centre at 0400 and see what a ghost town she really is. The sick and the lame, the poor and the hungry. The doped up walking dead stumbling into the pillars of the GPO and falling into a heap on the cold wet concrete.
It used to be fun to torment the lovers in the back seats of the cars parked under the trees on the Chapelizod side of the Phoenix Park. Try that these days and you'll find cars full of children and adults, all heaped up on top of each other with the Mammy sitting in the front seat staring straight ahead, smacked out of it and no clue where she is or how she ended up there. Kids spitting toothpaste out the back windows in the early morning mist because it's too cold to get out if they're not fully dressed. They cry, they stamp their feet, but nobody cares. They're hungry. They have nits and fleas and a permanent cough on the chest. They can't even light a fire to make toast and heat the water for tea. The cops would be all over them - but not in a good way either.
Face it lads: escalating house prices won't kill you.
Living like that poor family will.
Nobody cares about that aspect, which is kind of self-defeating, no? The prices, the materials, the location, the neighbours, the infrastructure, are apparently what matters more. Lash 'em up - throw them in, move on to the next few acres of massive profits for some and total and complete misery for others.
You're still living in the 1940's.
The modern world passed you by decades ago, and even Jamal and Rodrigo can see that.
Fuck buying an 'overvalued' house - buy a flight to absolutely fucking anywhere, it doesn't matter where, it can only get better.
Paddy taking a break from work in 1942:
Paddy building something for himself in 2026:
