Being a landlord requires such adroitness in dealing with tenants, that it's clearly not for everyone. With the tenant, it's an unequal relationship - as owner of the property you have the power of making people homeless. It's a daunting role in a country which salivates on folk memory of evictions. Landlord is a term of inherited abuse.
The other side of the coin is that after a while it evens out. Malign tenants make your life miserable - and still stay within the law. Every veteran property owner I know has had the "tenant from hell". Unlikely though it may sound, I know landlords who have been beaten, traduced, robbed and bad-mouthed. Fraud has been committed upon them by tenants accessing their bank accounts, blackmail has been tried on spurious grounds of sexual harassment. And yet they have not used their trump card of eviction.
Instead, they have gone out of their way to bring some order into chaotic lives, becoming a kind of father or mother figure en route.
It's not a role I relish, because I fear it sets up a dependency that is more difficult to escape from - the best teachers, after all, are the ones to whom the pupil do not return for support. But I have, mainly by default, helped out, where my head told me to get rid of them. Other instincts said the person needed help - they were not parasites or scroungers. In fact, sometimes landlords persist, not from greed or exploitation, but because it's in the blood. We like property and providing a roof over someone's head.
Landlords must come from a long line of innkeepers. Or circus owners. Maybe, in the dim mists of history, we kept herds on the mountains and the nurturing impulse in the genes now tells us to give shelter to immigrants or alcoholics . How else to explain our tolerance of tenants in all their variegated plumage? I know landlords, for instance, who have gone to court to give a character reference to a tenant who got into a drunken scrap or who thrashed a girlfriend's flat in a fit of rage and rejection.
"Oh compassionate and brave landlord," I hear you chorus. I plead no such sanctity, as I come from a long line of farmers who provided land for tenants, fields for cattle - and took taxes from ships that sailed up the Shannon. There is no halo around my head.
Such meandering thoughts came to me the other day when I passed a former tenant in the street. She was well gone before I recognised her - but something about the trundling shape struck a bell. She had answered an advert and appeared at first sight a normal, if overweight, tenant. She had a salaried job but few friends. I soon found why - she had her own substitute family of toy teddy bears.
Within weeks of arriving, she filled the flat with every conceivable size, shape and colour of teddy bear. Anytime I visited, more appeared in the menagerie - they stared at me from chairs , crockery cupboards, bathroom shelves - anywhere you looked a teddy looked back.
She brought them into conversation - if I made a joke, she looked to see if teddy was amused. If not, she was not. When she littered the flat with half-opened tins of food for teddies, I realised she was not the full shilling. When the tins produced swarms of bugs and flies, I contacted the health board, who in turn brought her family on the case. In time she was taken into care, with a token bag of teddies for company during the drive to the hospital.
In another life I was a zoo-keeper. Now I am a landlord.
