Suzanne Harrington: Kill your darlings as cost of living hits crisis point
People do want to work, but not so that their hard-earned goes mostly on renting a dump, or paying a gas bill.
What do you do when your young adult kids can’t do a basic launch into the world because you’ve failed them by not being a millionaire? Your worry, is what you do. Worry, worry, worry. You’d see a therapist except you can’t afford one.
And while this is not a singular problem — as that recent daft.ie research showed, there are 716 rental properties in the whole of Ireland, for a population of 5.1 million.
In the UK, the rental market is so screwed that tenants are unable to move out of rented properties because they have nowhere else to go — the result is adult kids living at home longer than Jesus ever did. Birds forever trapped in the parental nest, wings clipped.
In Britain, universities are no longer free, which means students of bog standard degrees graduate around £30K in debt to the tuition fees alone — that’s before you ever consider renting student digs or a weekly bag of basics from Lidl.
Boomers bang on about too many lattes and avocado toast, but it’s bigger than that. The rich often talk about everyone needing to work harder, from the ease and comfort of their inherited wealth — but the people who work the hardest are the poor. Ask any factory worker, any bin collector, or any care assistant. Anyone with two jobs working double shifts.
Meanwhile, adult kids are moving into sheds in parental gardens — if you are lucky enough to have a garden. Visiting friends in the Irish suburbs recently, they pointed to the row of houses backing onto their own. Almost half of the gardens had kids in sheds. It’s becoming normal, for young adults who don’t want to live abroad or study elsewhere or are on low income, or all three.
There’s much talk of sheds in our house at the moment as we figure out how to get the firstborn through UK university without anyone resorting to sex work or minor drug dealing — two occupations for which I have increasing sympathy, frankly, as we all worry about whether we will end up eating our pets this winter, if only we could afford the gas and electric to cook them properly.
What’s frustrating is how we have been so effectively conditioned to blame individuals rather than systems, to blame each other rather than standing back and appraising exactly what got our adult kids living in sheds in the first place.
So instead of rethinking the utter shambles of our economic system, overseen by greedy incompetents and controlled by an unelected corporatocracy, we bang on about millennials spending too much on brunch, or immigrants stealing all the houses, or that classic one, "nobody wants to work anymore."
People do want to work, but not so that their hard-earned goes mostly on renting a dump, or paying a gas bill. Ireland and the UK are rich countries — not Gulf rich, but rich nevertheless. Yet we are facing a winter of shed insulation, googling how to be sex workers, and pets looking increasingly nervous. It’s like trade unions never existed.
We need big change.
