We’re building new homes alright, but for cars, not people

HAVE you noticed, on your travels around Ireland these days, that virtually every town in the country has at least three things in common with every other town? No matter where you go — on the Cork to Dublin road, through the towns in the midlands or the west or the northeast, down south of Limerick and into Kerry, or through Carlow, Kilkenny and into the southeast — they’re all the same.

Every single town has a new hotel on its outskirts, sometimes one on each corner of the town — and all the hotels have enormous signs outside, advertising the cheapest prices you’ve ever seen and the most attractive possible amenities. After you’ve seen the signs, you’d never want to stay anywhere else — until you see the next sign.

Second, every town is ringed by new apartment blocks. They’re all luxurious, they’re all exclusive, they’re all dripping with prestige. You have to be ready to snap them up, because they’re all “almost” sold out. Generally speaking, they tend to be surrounded by scaffolding, and they’re usually built so close to the road that it’s hard to visualise the gardens and the play areas that must be associated with such luxury and prestige. But, sure, no doubt all that is coming.

And the third thing you see, at the edge of every town, are the new cathedrals. New places of worship, built on a scale we’ve never seen before. Humbling in their majesty, awe-inspiring in their magnificence. What new gods, you wonder, have come to inhabit the earth? Who could possibly deserve a home made with such a lavish outpouring of glass and steel, such vaulted ceilings, such an abundance of light that they can be seen from miles away? And then you draw a little closer, and see the signs over these wonderful basilicas. Honda. Mitsubishi. Volvo. Ford. And, slowly, it dawns on you.

It’s not gods that live here, nor even people of high rank. These homes were built for cars, to keep them dry, warm and shiny, and to enable us to gaze on them with wonder. It’s one of the great manifestations of the new religion of consumerism — materialism made flesh.

It must cost millions. All over the country we have built huge shrines to new cars. Nobody lives there except the cars, and yet they’re lit through the night. They look warm and comfortable, the cars all beautifully looked after. There are places in our larger cities where there are whole streets of these cathedrals, lined up one after the other, each one more magnificent than the next. In all our lifetimes, there has never been anything like it. Palaces for cars: magnificent surroundings to make sure they feel at home.

Sister Stanislaus Kennedy, writing in the annual report of Focus Ireland, describes ‘home’ this way: “Home is a place in which to feel safe and secure, warm and dry. A place to rest, eat, sleep and entertain, find solitude, pray, love, laugh, argue and cry.

“A place to read a book, share a meal, watch a television programme, play an instrument, do a bit of gardening, play with the children, get the housework done and the bills paid, be at ease with oneself and with friends and family, in safety and security without fear of interference or intrusion.”

She goes on to say that the need for a place like she describes is deep and urgent in all of us. “The desire for a place called home is the deepest need in every human heart and perhaps the least recognised,” she says. I’m sure the cars feel the same.

We started building these mausoleums in the early 1990s, as the Celtic tiger started to roar. In 1995, for example, we bought almost 83,000 new cars. By 2005 that number had increased to 166,000 — double the number we bought a mere decade earlier.

(The number of second-hand cars we’ve been buying has actually declined a bit in the same period. There wouldn’t be room for them in the motor cathedrals. On the other hand, the number of cars that are big and powerful, as well as shiny, has gone up by a factor of six.)

But here’s an odd thing. Back in 1996, again a decade ago, the number of people who were homeless in Ireland was almost 2,500. The most recent official figure was 5,581. The number of shiny new cars we own has doubled in a decade; so has the number of people who have nowhere to live.

Nowhere to live? There are different definitions of homelessness. Focus Ireland includes three categories in its definition of homelessness: visible homelessness (sleeping rough or living in emergency shelters); hidden homelessness (involuntarily sharing with family and friends or living in woefully inadequate housing); and at being at risk of homelessness (likely to become homeless due to economic difficulties, too high a rent burden, insecure tenure or health difficulties). The official doubling of homelessness during the busiest years of the Celtic tiger was in the ‘visible homelessness’ category.

There are other ways to measure the need for a home of your own. The most common and often used method is by counting the number of people on the waiting lists for local authority housing. And guess what? A decade ago, there were about 25,000 families on the waiting lists, and now it’s just short of 50,000. Doubled again.

It’s strange, isn’t it? All these cars, living in their wonderful showrooms; the rest of us with our faces pressed against the glass. Those of us who have a second-hand car want a new one. Those with a new one want a bigger one. Few of us are content with one car — the number of two and three-car families in Ireland has also, you guessed it, doubled in the last decade.

Over the weekend, I read a couple of newspaper columnists in the Sunday papers, including some who ought to know better, having a bit of a cut at the “poverty industry”. The headlines, of course, were full of the news (if it is news and not just speculation) that Brian Cowen is going to cut the top rate of tax in tomorrow’s Budget. There’s good news for us all — we’ll be able to pop around to the local car showroom and admire the glossy brochures. By this time next year, if the good news keeps rolling, another 100,000 new cars will have left their shiny palaces in order to transport us in the luxury to which we have become accustomed.

And a few more people will join the housing waiting lists, only to discover that the great Irish dream of a home of your own is slipping further and further away. A few more people will become homeless altogether. A few more will be unable to cope with the pressures of the modern world. We might even find some sleeping rough in the doorways of the new cathedrals. Looking for sanctuary, maybe, at the mercy of the new religion.