An Irishman's Diary

We are months away from perpetrating one of the greatest follies in the history of Dublin - the destruction of the Ballymun tower…

We are months away from perpetrating one of the greatest follies in the history of Dublin - the destruction of the Ballymun tower complex. At the best of times, with the economy stagnant and a surplus of housing to enable us to to move the needy around, it would still have been a poor idea. But now, at the height of the greatest accommodation crisis the capital has ever known, to destroy thousands of perfectly solid, potentially splendid homes according to some political agenda based on the companion emotions of piety and guilt is simple insanity.

There's nothing wrong with Ballymun, everything wrong with the social experiment which was conducted there. A great injustice was done to the people who were taken from the city centre and stored in the great filing cabinets stacked on the windswept grasslands of north Dublin nearly 40 years ago.

Blight and decay

It's no wonder that a culture of acute victimhood has been generated in Ballymun. It has colossal unemployment, crippling problems of crime, and a general air of blight and decay. Public development tower blocks are simply the wrong places to raise young families in - not just in Ireland, but anywhere in the world.

READ MORE

Just because the people there have become acutely aware of the injustice done to them doesn't mean that they are experts in housing. Yet that is what the entire "consultative" process has elevated them into. In the meetings between the Corporation and the residents, the opinions of the latter were not sought so much as their permission. Locked in their high-rises, what they dreamt of was a suburban paradise, with mile upon mile of houses with front and back gardens.

No one can blame the residents for having these fantasies; but it is not the duty of the State to indulge the daydreams of any group within its midst at the expense of the taxpayer. Yet this has happened. All the Corporation hopes for high-density housing were vetoed by residents' groups: the stereotypical ambition of front gardens and back gardens was clung to with undiminished zeal. Consultation became capitulation, and New Ballymun looks set to follow the example of Ballyfermot, Tallaght and Darndale, from which we may conclude that at least an entire generation must elapse before some sort of social and aesthetic order is achieved.

We are giving gardens to people who have never had them before. Gardens are hard work. But we are not giving them a garden each, but two; and the garden they will not use, and therefore not mind because it is public, for the same reason is the one that will be seen. Nothing spreads faster through a community than conspicuous blight; for why should I mind my own recreationally useless front garden if my neighbours don't mind theirs? It merely looks ridiculous if it is pretty and theirs are not: so let all front gardens be universally a tiphead.

Tower blocks

Already, I can hear howls that I am being patronising. Call it what you like. Others might say it is the voice of experience - of which, God knows, we have a lot. The hardest public duty in the world is tell victims, no, you may not have your way. The very victimhood which qualifies them for our attention is the quality which most distorts their judgment. Their loathing for the tower blocks is perfectly understandable, and explains why they want them pulled down; but that doesn't mean we should indulge their desires.

Ballymun has vast amounts of public space for housing, without demolishing the seven towers and the 19 spine-blocks. All families who want to leave those buildings should be accommodated locally, and the Ballymun complexes could then be handed over to private developers to renovate and rent out into the private sector. They could be the residential base of a new city, containing boulevards with shops, pubs and restaurants, yet within walking distance of old Dublin, and containing an admirable social mix.

Of course this makes sense only if the rental market is a profitable one; the last Bacon report, which actually punishes investors for putting money into the private rental sector, is a powerful factor against such daring and innovative investment. Instead, Government policy is ideologically fixated with people owning their own homes, as if all 25-year-olds want to settle down into the eternity of mortgagehood and the steady climb up the property ladder.

Home ownership

They don't - especially as an increasing number of 25year-olds in Ireland are not Irish, and are thus free of this stifling obsession with property ownership. What they want is security of tenure and flexibility of movement; they don't want to commit themselves financially to home ownership for the rest of their lives, but they do want to have the assurance their landlords won't turf them out for no reason.

They would be ideal residents for New Ballymun, which could be a glittering new departure both for Dublin and for the way we look at the housing market. Instead, hidebound by the traditional obsession that home ownership is morally superior to renting, and trapped into endless submission by the guilt we feel towards the people of Ballymun, we are once again building new Corporation garden suburbs, where new forms of victimhood will flourish as decay takes hold.

It is not too late. We could pull back from this craziness. We could recognise the potential of Ballymun and its towers as a new way forward. But this cannot happen while we are ruled by the madness of Bacon.