One of the things Sinn Féin used to be accused of was being a one-issue party: Irish reunification agus sin é. That’s not been the case for a long time, as even s blind-man-on-a-galloping-horse glance at defeated-MEP Lynn Boylan’s Facebook page will tell you. Another rebuttal even more emphatic comes from her partner Eoin Ó Broin, who launched his new book Home: why public housing is the answer in the Connolly Centre on the Falls Road last Thursday evening.
You only have to listen to Ó Broin for ten seconds to see that the brains are only bursting out of him. His book does what the writing of a real political thinker does: it makes you see an issue in a new way.
Most of us have been brain-washed into thinking of our homes – assuming we have one – in financial terms: how much will it cost me, how much will it increase over the years, will it prove I’m a shrewd investor. The title of Ó Broin’s book and the emphasis of his talk on Thursday is that houses are for living in, not investing in.
It makes sense. In one decade your house may be worth a bundle, in another decade it may be worth just half a bundle, but that won’t have changed your experience of living in it. Forever doing little calculations in our head or fondling massive imaginary house-sale money verges on the delusional. Homes are for living in, not for using as financial leverage.
Another point Ó Broin makes is, why does public housing have to be shoddy? Why, if a government is building houses, doesn’t it make them models of what a home should look like? Nobody’s talking mansions here, but why shouldn’t public housing exemplify well-thought-out architecture? Or is it that sure-it’ll-do because it’s only for ordinary people?
A final example of challenging questions raised by O’Broin: why isn’t housing of such a quality that people of all classes will be happy to live side by side? Why shouldn’t a doctor live beside a shelf-stacker? Why shouldn’t a lawyer be next-door-neighbour to a factory-worker? Just as separating our young at an early age into separate student collections cuts them off from whole swathes of their fellow-citizens, so too does separate housing mean that class division run deep and permanent. A lot of people who call for children to be taught together would run a mile from the notion of living beside people who are a different class from themselves.
The crash of 2008 came from a collapse of the housing market (notice how easily we assume housing is about the market, not living in homes?) Ó Broin suggests new and better ways for thinking about housing, and how it can benefit all of the population.
For a book bursting with novel thinking and real-world examples, Home is a steal at £10. Put it on your summer reading list.
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