Many apartments ban the practice of hanging clothes out to dry. But will high energy bills force a rethink, asks ALANNA GALLAGHER.

AFTER WEEKS of discussing Michelle Obama’s right to bare arms, the new hot topic of conversation in the United States is the right to dry clothes.

As money tightens and energy bills soar, a grassroots movement is campaigning for the right to use balconies, back gardens and yards to hang clothes. The campaign wants the first family to show solidarity by hanging their laundry on a line on the White House lawn. In clothes lines we trust . . .

Does the issue resonate with Irish washer women and men? Have we, in our rush to own property, hung ourselves out to dry laundry-wise as well as financially?

DERMOT BANNON, architect and face of RTÉ's Room to Improve, thinks so. Airing your clean linen in public is an unfortunate legacy of the boom, he laments. Many apartments and new home owners and tenants now find themselves literally living with their laundry because they signed a "no clothing on balconies" rule with their management company.

For years the solution to wet clothes was to tumble dry. Usage of driers increased 183 per cent in the period 1987-2004/5. Wet appliances such as washing machines and tumble driers now account for 9 per cent of all domestic electricity we use, according to a recent Sustainable Energy Ireland's Energy in the Residential Sector.

These rising electricity and gas bills have made most of us rethink our laundry routines. The reality is that people in Ireland shouldn’t have to put their clothes in driers, says Bannon. “Weather conditions are perfect for drying clothes outside.”

But Bannon also understands the restrictions put in place by management companies in apartment developments. “You can spend three or four months designing a building so that the details are really crisp, only to have the aesthetic destroyed by five pairs of knickers hanging on a line.”

The average household does somewhere between four and five loads of washing a week. At an average of six kilograms per load, that amounts to upwards of 24kg of wet laundry to find drying space for.

The right to dry clothes is something we all take for granted, says Marie Fitzpatrick, who lived in an apartment block in Drumcondra with a “no clothes on balcony” rule. She ignored the rule and hung clothing on a clothes horse on the balcony, as did a many of her neighbours.

“We got a communal letter warning us that if we continued to break the rules they, the unsigned, would hire a man with a ladder to climb up onto our balconies and take the offending garments and put them into storage. They would then charge us the hire fee of the man, his ladder and the storage costs.

“I understand the aesthetic argument, but since you pay rent, it is your space and you should be able to do as you please with it.”

She’d definitely sign a petition.

There are creative solutions to the problem, adds Don Coughlan, publisher of Green Pages. “A low-hanging washing line on the balcony means it doesn’t have to look like a Chinese laundry,” he says.

Zoe Clarke is a window dresser with high-street fashion house Zara and a bit of a clothes horse.

She thinks the idea has legs but won’t grace the outside space she calls her own with her smalls. “I like the theory of a communal line or laundry room but I’d be afraid to hang my designer jeans there for fear that someone might take them.”

Presently, Clarke resorts to hanging her garments on a clothes horse in their living room, in front of the radiator because there isn’t anywhere else to house the horse.

There are health implications

to drying your clothes in the room you live in, says Bannon. “Putting clothes on radiators heats up the moisture in them and returns it into the atmosphere in the room and makes it damp. The standard room ventilator can’t handle that volume of moisture.”

STYLIST JAN BRIERTON is already a big line dryer and supports the right to dry. She lives in an old-fashioned estate in Donnycarney where no such drying restrictions apply. “I use the line for almost everything, she says. “Nothing can recreate the fresh smell of line-hung bed linen. And whites stay bright having been bleached by the sun.”

PR woman Sophie Flynn-Rodgers believes in taking the problem outside where possible. “Every house should have a drying shed, with louvred doors and windows. My mother has one.”

Right2dry.org already has a celebrity following that includes OC actress Rachel Bilson and singer Olivia Newton-John. “It’s all right for Olivia Newton John to advocate drying your clothes outside from the heat of her Malibu home,” laughs Bannon.

Dan Coughlan believes enlightened self-governance by owners and management companies here could see open green communal spaces being used for washing lines.

With Brian Cowen’s smalls having recently been exhibited at the National Gallery, maybe the artist behind the portraits might like to consider his or her next work: an installation featuring a clotheshorse of wet clothes being hung out to dry.