Next year it will be 40 years since I got my first mortgage, jointly with my wife-to-be. I am 63. I got a mortgage at 24.
I was a very badly paid freelance journalist with an unstable income. My wife had just got a job as a secondary school teacher. We were able to stop paying rent and buy a small but very comfortable house on the north side of Dublin, half an hour’s walk from O’Connell Bridge. We didn’t think any of this was unusual.
I was thinking about this when I read Eoin Burke-Kennedy's report in The Irish Times of recent remarks by the chief executive of one of the State's biggest house builders, Cairn Homes. Michael Stanley cited what he described as a "mind-blowing statistic".
It related to home ownership rates among 25- to 39-year-olds. Stanley noted that the percentage of this age group that own their own home dropped from 22 per cent in 2011 to 16 per cent in 2016. Based on his company’s own research, it is now about 12 per cent. That really is pretty mind-blowing.
In all the time I’ve lived in Ireland, which is most of my life, just five years has been spent in private rented accommodation. I was born in a rented flat, but my parents moved to the Dublin Corporation house in Crumlin where my mother had already been living, before I was two. We rented flats after leaving college, then we got a mortgage when we got married and then we got another one when we had our second child.
So, mostly, did our siblings and friends. And interestingly, this was true pretty much regardless of your broader social and political attitudes. If you were a Marxist revolutionary who wanted to overthrow capitalism, you probably went to the same building society as your classmate who was in Fianna Fáil and training to be a corporate tax accountant.
It was all basic economics: paying a mortgage was, with tax subsidies, seldom more expensive than paying rent (though there were years when rocketing interest rates made it a very tight squeeze). And you got an asset in return.
This was all part of the deep transformation of Ireland after the 1960s: the huge expansion of the Catholic middle class. And it was one of the two layers of ballast that kept conservative Ireland afloat during a period of what, objectively, ought to have a period of radical instability.
Stand back from modern Irish history, and you can see two episodes of that great paradox: conservative revolution. The first was the nationalist revolution that led to the foundation of the State.
Small landowners
Why was it not also a social revolution? Priests and property. The Catholic Church functioned as a powerful ideological and social stabiliser. But, just as importantly, Ireland had its land war before it had its national revolution. It had become a society of small landholders, of possessors who now had something to lose.
The second revolution was the one I was born into: the one launched by Seán Lemass and TK Whitaker in 1958. It was driven by the same perception that animates the great novel published in that year, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, in which Tancredi famously explains: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”
Things did change, of course, and very radically too – from rural to urban, from protectionism to globalisation, from agricultural to industrial and post-industrial. But in political terms they hardly changed at all. Why? Priests and property.
On the one hand, the institutional Church weathered all this change so well that, for a long time, it seemed, if anything, stronger than it had been before. And on the other hand, the housing system more or less managed to do the job of giving a new class of people a slice of property and, therefore, something to lose. The second conservative revolution had roughly the same basis as the first.
Think about the 1980s, when I was getting my first mortgage. It was a brutal time. The economic boom of the 1960s and 1970s evaporated. The Troubles reached an emotional crescendo with the hunger strikes. Mass emigration resumed. There was a huge, and very successful, right-wing Catholic backlash that triumphed in the abortion and divorce referendums. The defining political figure, Charles Haughey, was a flagrant kleptocrat.
And yet things did not fall apart. The centre could hold. In 1989, near the end of this awful decade, there was a general election. The three conservative parties, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Progressive Democrats, took 83 per cent of the vote between them.
The ballast had stayed in place at the bottom of the ship. The Church was still immensely strong. And the home-owning middle class was still being created.
Very crudely but not inaccurately, the making of this new Catholic middle class was a process of the recycling of capital. In the 1950s, the main form of capital was land. In the 1960s and 1970s, it was recycled into educational capital, the credentials that got you into good white-collar jobs. Those jobs in turn allowed you to recycle your income into home ownership. It was a system that excluded very many, but worked for enough people enough of the time.
Social housing
This was all driven by the State – through the massive expansion of second and then third-level education, the growth of public sector jobs, tax subsidies for mortgages and (for people like my parents) the opportunity for tenants of social housing to become owners of their own homes.
And now?
The ballast of priests and property has been ditched overboard. Conservative Ireland has smashed its own support systems. The Church betrayed its flock in the child abuse scandals. And the conservative parties, drunk on the delusions of the Celtic Tiger, turned housing into a commodity that is increasingly beyond the reach of young people, even couples with jobs much better than my wife and I had in 1982.
Instead of reacting to the disaster of the 2008 property crash by resetting national policy to make housing affordable and available, the system did everything it could to reflate property prices – a policy that suited the older people already in possession of housing but that disadvantaged the young.
This is the biggest underlying reason why the two conservative parties between them can no longer muster more than half of the electorate. And it’s why, when the great Covid mist eventually clears, we will see a political landscape more unstable than it has been for a very long time.
Neither priests nor property are now functioning as guarantors of continuity. The Church is not coming back to rescue political conservatism in Ireland. And there is no sign that the old political culture knows how to rescue itself by getting to grips with a housing crisis that has been going on, in different forms, for a quarter of a century.
The next passage will be rough.