Homelessness is the word and homelessness the magic key to unlock the stoniest heart. That is why Rashers Tierney in James Plunkett's Strumpet City is such a moving figure. Now, amidst our boom, homelessness is again the great morally unassailable issue, made more confused by the perfectly shocking case of the raped and tortured girl, vagrant on the streets of Dublin. But she is sui generis. The State's failure towards her was one of non-intervention; its more general failure has been the very opposite. It has intervened when it should not have done.
Not that using the term "homelessness" indicates that we have a common meaning for it. We don't. The word has been bandied around in recent weeks as if Dublin is teeming with the homeless, as was Berlin in 1945. Not so. Merely because you haven't got somewhere to stay for the night doesn't make you homeless; and merely because you haven't got somewhere to stay for several successive nights doesn't mean the State is somehow obliged to find you a permanent home.
Sleeping rough
Certainly, no adults should find themselves sleeping rough, unless of course, they choose to, and temporary hostels should be provided to ensure that nobody is sleeping in gutters. But if, as Homeless Initiative, the voluntary ginger group, complains, Dublin Corporation has housed just five single people who use homeless shelters in the past five months, then maybe the Corporation got it just about right.
Who has the State the obligation to house permanently rather than merely to shelter temporarily from the elements? Very, very few. They are those who have mental, physical or psychological infirmities which prevent them entering the accommodation marketplace; those who, left to their own devices, will always end up on the street, but if given some assistance, will make and run a decent home for themselves. Our obligation to them is absolute.
But the State has no obligation to provide a home to someone who hasn't got one. What it has an obligation to do is to ensure that those at the bottom end of the housing market are not inhibited from finding accommodation by restrictive practices in that marketplace; and the most restrictive practice in that marketplace, which will make accommodation increasingly difficult to get for the thousands of incomers looking for work, has not been the work of some conspiracy of racketeering landlords but that conspiracy of democrats called the Government.
If any landlord did to the rented sector what the Government has done with its latest, idiotic intrusion into the marketplace, there would be uproar. But the Government is not a landlord; and moreover, its policy is populist, designed to appeal to existing residents who have votes at the expense of immigrants who have not. The response? Silence.
Moral superiority
The latest Bacon proposals are an urban re-enactment of the myth of the moral superiority of the small farmer which caused the Land Commission to create ideologically sound, but economically unsustainable small holdings a century ago. The Irish countryside was socially reconstructed around politically desirable precepts of making the small tenant farmer the small holder, regardless of the economic consequence. The landless labourer, naturally, was excluded from the deal. We have spent the past 40 years undoing the damage.
Bacon is Land Commission II. His proposals seem to be socially desirable, in that they are designed to facilitate the purchase of accommodation. In reality, they discriminate directly against those far down the accommodation ladder, who need a place to sleep at night and hang their toothbrush, who don't want to live in a hostel, who don't want to be dependent on anyone, but who haven't the capital, or the inclination, to enter the housing market as a buyer. But these people are the lifeblood of an economy; they are young, versatile, mobile. These are the victims of Land Commission II.
Bacon raised the stamp duty on the purchase of rented accommodation from 3 per cent to 9 per cent. The cost of buying a flat at £150,000 for renting out rose at a stroke by £10,000 - and this from a Government which says it is tackling inflation. That's quite a feat. Furthermore, if the flat is sold within three years of purchase, the government claims 3 per cent of its capital value for each year. The market is restricted at point of purchase and point of sale.
Possible outcomes
There are two possible outcomes to this insanity. One is that capital is driven away from investment in the private rented sector in Ireland to the free and unrestricted market abroad, in which case accommodation here will become scarcer and, as the population soars, rents will soar also. The other is that the demand for rented accommodation is so great anyway that the new tax will simply be passed on to tenants in higher rents. Both results are inflationary; both are assaults on a politically weak but economically vital sector of the community - the people who staff the service industries. The landless labourer, written out of the deal, yet again.
It is a rule which Thatcher taught us, and which has revolutionised the world: leave the market alone. Deal with supply. Allow the market to get access to what it wants. If it's oranges, let it have oranges; if it's flats, then let it have flats, and let prices find their own level. When governments introduce differentials in the housing marketplace, you don't get more homes but more homelessness. Bacon is about to make more Rashers.