A Different View with Dave O’Connell

If there’s one thing worse than the realisation that you may never own your own home, it’s someone from an earlier time telling you that they bought their first house for a price that now wouldn’t stretch to purchasing one of those home office garden sheds.

Our forefathers did it to us – without any malice but perhaps with a small soupcon of smugness – when they told us of the first property they bought for five or six hundred quid back in the seventies.

And for good measure, they might add that they didn’t even need a mortgage.

Fast forward to the early nineties and I was in my twenties, living in Cork, when it seemed logical to look at putting down tentative roots.

The economy was slowly working its way back up off its knees after a grim run in the eighties – but the housing market was buoyant, and you were spoiled for choice as a first-time buyer.

I decided on a new three-bed semi-detached bungalow in an estate under construction in the Cork city suburb of Rochestown. It cost £34,000, a not inconsiderable sum but equally not one that would require anything other than a standard 20-year mortgage.

Apart from the first-time house buyer’s grant of £2,000, I hadn’t a penny left for furniture or fittings, but that grant covered the cost of two beds, one wardrobe, a cooker and washing machine, a cheap table and chairs, lino for the kitchen (with the leftover bits covering the bathroom) and industrial carpet for some of the floors.

Further down the road, there was enough left in the wallet for hall and sitting room carpet and finally a three-piece suite – but that delay might also have been down to the fact that I didn’t really curtail my social activities.

The point about this is not to boast because buying your first home in your twenties was the rule, not the exception.

That’s not true now.

And the knock-on of condemning a generation to rent their homes was laid bare in the Simon Communities of Ireland’s report into Older Adult Homelessness, which both painted the current picture – and predicted a grim future scenario.

The number of older people ‘retiring into homelessness’ has skyrocketed by 500% in the West in less than ten years – and while the actual numbers are not huge as yet (over 65s make up 2/3% of adults in homelessness in Ireland), that sort of trajectory is utterly unsustainable…but, unless something seismic is done, it is equally inevitable.