GIVE ME A BREAK:WOULDN'T IT be nice to live in a hotel? Breakfast buffet daily, fresh linens and towels, a swimming pool, gym, sauna and kids' club on tap. Just get the kids dressed, feed them in the communal breakfast room (where there's so much choice they can't refuse to eat), then walk out the door, drop them to school and after that you and your family come and go as you please, writes Kate Holmquist

The kids come home from school to enter a kids’ club staffed by trained childcare workers. When you straggle in from work, there’s a doorman, desk staff, concierge. They’ve got your washing done. In your room, there’s a flatscreen TV and an en suite bathroom. Bar downstairs. Listening-in service for when you want to put your kids to bed and go with your partner for a romantic meal in the hotel restaurant. Massage, beauty treatments, holistic therapies – an entire pampering menu available for an extra charge.

And it’s so cheap – €20 per room per night on particular days of the week. Some of the best four-star hotels in Ireland are offering such luxury for less than €50 per room per night.

I’m doing my sums. Say I haggle a deal – €50 per night bed and breakfast in a four-star hotel for a family of four. Per month, that’s about €1,500 euro – less than a lot of mortgages. Add in the fact that you’d be avoiding creche fees of €1,000 per month per child, and that’s where this hotel deal with free kids’ clubs really starts to pay its way.

You’ve got to buy evening dinner on top of that, but with a microwave and kitchenette in your room – as the Holiday Inn Express has in the US – you can bring home some ready-meals from Tesco or MS and just heat them up. A few boxes of cereal and some milk in the fridge will keep the kids’ hunger pangs at bay. And if even that’s too much, you can order takeaway from a multitude of nearby fast food places.

Sure, four people living in one room – even a large, luxury, four-star room – can be claustrophobic, but who spends that much time at home anyway? Once you collect your kids from the kids’ club at 7pm, there’s only an hour or two until bedtime, so it’s not like you’re actually keeping house in this hotel. You’re merely living in it, for the moment. And that’s all that matters because, after all, it’s not where you live that matters, it’s being with your family.

We could call these places “family life centres”, since the term “hostel” is hostile.

This not-quite-utopian vision of family life in the future came to me while I was listening to Dr Chris Van Egeraat, an economics lecturer at NUI Maynooth, on News at One on Sunday. The many people needing to find new jobs in Limerick, following the Dell closure, are unlikely to find work in their local area. They would need to sell their homes – at far less than they were worth a year ago – and migrate to where the work is. There will be “huge social costs”, he said, but social geography is as seismic as physical geography.

And not just in Limerick. Countrywide, the unemployment rate could exceed 12 per cent this year, according to Fás.

If the answer is to move where the jobs are, then readily available housing will be required for families. Combine that with the crisis in the hotel industry, because too many hotel rooms were built with money lent generously by the banks, and you have the solution: hotels for migrant workers.

You see, buying a house, putting down roots in one place and expecting to raise your children in that area is fast becoming a lifestyle available only to the privileged. Saskia Sassen, another social geographer, flagged this years ago. There are people with a lifestyle, and then there are people who work to make that lifestyle possible but don’t have the lifestyle themselves. Their lifestyle is to move to where the work is.

Nobody complained as this happened in Ireland, since the migrant labour was made up of Filipinos and Poles and other foreigners migrating into Ireland. They were serving us our cappuccinos and cleaning our hotel rooms and – when architects were in high demand – even designing our hotel rooms.

Now the situation is reversed and we’re to become the migrants now. What an awful word – “migrant” – just as hostile as hostel. A better spin would be to call Europe’s migrant workforce, of which more and more people are a part, Europe’s “mobile” workforce.

Mobile families living in family lifestyle centres as they travel from one short-term contract to the next is an accepted pattern in the US, which is why those budget hotels have en suite kitchens. They get around by car, but, with the availability of cheap flights within Europe, our newly mobile families will be able to come and go by air.

Just think of the advantages for the kids (new cultures) and the parents (no housework). It’s one solution, that’s all. Does anyone have a better one? Not this Government, anyway.

kholmquist@irishtimes.com