Edel Coffey: Every person in this country should have access to emotional security
I stood there looking at books but I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t think of anything but the man outside. Picture: Ray Ryan
Last week, I stopped to give a homeless man some money.
I didn’t have much cash in my purse. Nobody carries cash anymore, not since the pandemic changed our relationship with money to a relationship with tapping, but I gave him what little I had.
A few minutes later, a few streets over, as I was walking into a bookshop, another homeless man pleaded bitterly with me for some money.
I told him I had given what cash I had to another homeless man I had just met. But he was so distressed and so upset that he told me that I didn’t care and that nobody cared.
He told me everyone just tells him to F*** off and that just a few moments beforehand a woman had given him a 1c coin and laughed at him as she walked into the shop.
I told him I was sorry, then went inside the shop myself.
I stood there looking at books but I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t think of anything but the man outside.
I couldn’t help but think he was right. How could I stand here inside the warmth and emotional security of this world knowing he was sitting outside on the cold street?
I looked around and wondered which of the women standing reading the back of books was the one who had thought it was okay to give him a 1c coin and laugh at him. I slipped out the back door of the shop and walked back towards the ATM. I took out a note for him and a couple of extra notes to have because I didn’t want to say ‘sorry, I’ve no cash’ to another homeless person that day.
My mind went to an article I had read about the Nobel laureate economist Robert Schiller who has posited that the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the general nerve-shredding anxiety that has come with living in uncertain times has driven up house prices.
I wondered how our frayed nerves could be the thing that is buoying up the property market but Schiller is not a Nobel laureate for nothing.
He predicted the tech bubble crash and the global property crash along with the recession it triggered. And now he explained that the hit of ‘emotional security’ we get from buying and owning our own homes in uncertain times is the thing that is giving the property market its buoyancy.
It made perfect sense.
Renting during the pandemic brought tenants’ anxieties to a whole new level, to the extent that the government had to put in place a freeze on rent and a ban on evictions.
I well remember the constant gnawing low-grade baseline fear I felt when I was renting. The innocent text from a landlord that would lead to a spiral of fear – what could they possibly want to talk about if not eviction? How would I hide that mark on the wall from them when they came around? What about the secret tenant – the cat? – would he stay quiet if I hid him in my bedroom with a packet of Dreamies? Or would he let out a tell-tale MIAOW?
Beads of sweat would form on my brow just thinking about it.
Then there were the repairs. If something broke, you’d be inclined to fix it yourself and absorb the cost rather than drawing attention to yourself. There was always the risk that you might be alerting the landlord to a renovation project they had been thinking about for some time or the fact that they should really just sell that property.
These feelings were the opposite of the emotional security Schiller was talking about.
I mulled it around my head as I walked back to the book shop and gave the homeless man some money. I knew it wouldn’t change his life in any way but I hoped would improve his day and make him think that somebody cared about him, even for a moment.
He told me he was sorry that he was upset. I told him he was right to be upset. His life looked incredibly hard to me.
We chatted for a little while longer and he took out his phone to show me some pictures of his dog. He swiped his thumb across the smashed screen and I thought of the spare Nokia phone with the perfect screen bought as a stopgap and now flung under a bed somewhere in my house.
He asked me did I have any pets and I showed him some pictures of my own cats.
He remarked on the cats, but the thing he focused in on was the garden that the cats were sitting in, the landscaped plants, the neat walls, the tidy patio. He said he thought it looked lovely.
And for a second I saw what he was seeing through the few square inches of my phone screen - emotional security. The emotional security that Schiller was talking about, the state that I am so lucky to live in every day, and the state that every person in this country should have access to but doesn't.
