HOUSE HUNTER:We could afford a lot of places we have looked at but we also have to factor in the unexpected when we bid, writes DON MORGAN

WE BOUGHT – two words, one sentence, zero detail. And without a cultural context, it makes absolutely no sense.

A Frenchman might ask, quite legitimately, what on earth the other person has bought. But if the conversation involves two Irish, there’s no confusion at all: “Oh did you? Where?” “In .”

The above conversation, I wager, is one that you’ve probably heard about a million times. Only the Irish talk about having “bought”. How many times have you come home, having purchased two CDs and a packet of socks, to declare proudly you have bought?

Irish people buy homes, living with the contradiction of having no savings whatsoever but having the social expectation that adulthood is only reached when such a purchase has been made. It’s off to whichever loanmeister will pony-up the dough so that you can lie awake at night wondering if you can make payments which have reached the realms of the ridiculous.

Take our mortgage. We were sanctioned for over €500,000. Initially, it was hard to wipe the smugness off my face – we were worth that much to the bank. It was like Christiano Ronaldo when Real Madrid first came knocking, but it’s a long way down, Ronnie, to being on I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here eating slugs, ok? The same way for us. Just because the bank want to give us all that money, doesn’t mean we can actually afford it or need it. Which is why we have to do our sums anew.

As with everything, the devil is in the detail. Monthly repayments could reach the guts of €2,000, at current interest rate levels. If those rates go up, we’ll be crucified. It’s a reason why, when we have bid on houses, we were trying to contort ourselves to fit sums of money which don’t work for us in the context of the particular houses which we deemed suitable. We try to factor in economic changes, and so either lose out to those who can or will pay up, or are just dismissed out of hand by the vendor, which although annoying, is their prerogative.

At the moment, we could afford a lot of places we have looked at, but what if one of us gets sick? What if it wasn’t just the two of us anymore? What if we had a child and couldn’t afford the unsubsidised childcare? Banks don’t do mental stress tests. That’s your job.

Some things in life are worthy of risk. Love is. Family is. Is a mortgage? You have to be cold in order to establish whether or not the investment you make is worth it, even if you can see your Waltons-esque future in every crack and every squeaky floorboard in the godforsaken shack you want as your own.

On a trip last year to Kassel (in Germany), a city the size of Cork, we found a house in Süsterfeld, a quiet residential area within easy reach of everything, at the edge of the city, but only 10 minutes from the city centre thanks to excellent public transport. We looked at the house, which my wife described as “specy” – new build, four beds, built to the highest standards. It even has a roof garden, basement and huge actual garden. It’s also two minutes from the local primary school if you crawl. Asking price? €250,000. We returned this year to visit friends who live next to it to discover local uproar because an investor had bought it for tax purposes and was leaving it unoccupied.

In Ireland we have a peculiar relationship towards owning property. It’s part historical, part based on a unique notion of what an asset can give you in terms of status.

Nowhere else I can think of is this quite so pronounced as in Ireland, where such disgust at our own, many empty houses has yet to come to the surface.