It’s that time of year again. The sun is shining and it’s raining “per-person-sharing” offers. Hotels up and down the country are showering twosomes with invitations to come and stay at a rate of two for the price of one. “Spring sale: 20% off – €179 pps”, chirrup the ads on the back pages of newspapers. “Weekend madness, bubbles on arrival – per couple”. Anyone not coupled up gets the message – no dogs or singletons need apply.
Not wishing to begrudge happy pairs but it is blatant discrimination to charge Bridget Jones or a man called Ove double the sum just because they do not have a significant other. Hotel owners have been demanding that the public foot the bill to cut the VAT rate on their business while they continue to penalise tens of thousands of them for the social crime of being unattached. A well-known hotel is promoting a “summer special” of two nights B&B plus dinner on one night at €299 pps for those over 65, while singletons the same age must pay €498 each. At the time of the 2022 census, 189,574 people in that age bracket were living alone.
Hoteliers are not the only culprits. Tour operators and travel agents are at it too. Fancy a seven-night escorted tour of northern Spain in the autumn? Sounds enticing – return flights with check-in luggage, four-star accommodation, wine tasting, excursions to museums and vineyards – except, if you’re a singleton, you pay €425 extra for the pleasure. That’s €60-plus added for each day. Perhaps a cruise would be preferable. Forget it – you’ll pay a singles supplement for that too. Why don’t the unattached just go and buy a tent and pitch it somewhere out of everyone’s sight?
It is understandable that hotels want to maximise their revenue by having two paying customers in a room instead of only one but their rebuff of solo guests makes Scrooge look altruistic by comparison with the so-called hospitality sector. The government has indicated it intends to lower the VAT rate to 9 per cent again, at least for the food and catering elements of the sector, which include hotel diningrooms. If it ploughs ahead with the plan, it should impose an obligation on hotels to provide an adequate proportion of their bedrooms for single person occupancy.
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But that would be like expecting Donald Trump to have your baby. The State itself is so biased against single people as to be biologically incapable of playing fair. Even if singletons aged 66 to 70 do find someone with whom to share a hotel room, they are expected to travel alone should they wish to use their free travel pass to get there. Unlike the coupled-up whose spouses automatically go free too, the unattached must prove they are incapable of travelling alone to be deemed eligible for a travelling companion.
You could take the car but, there again, you will be punished for living alone. Insurance companies offer a price discount if the customer can conjure up a named driver to add to the policy. And, no, your great uncle Joe who emigrated to Cincinnati will not suffice.
Singlism is the great unacknowledged survivor of the war on -isms
Then there is the tax system. Married couples can minimise their income tax bill by opting to be jointly assessed while the singleton has no choice but to pay the full whack. The discrimination is even more pronounced when it comes to gift and inheritance tax. Better-off parents can lessen their offspring’s future inheritance tax bill by availing of the €3,000 annual gift tax exemption. Fiona Reddan did the sums in Tuesday’s edition of this newspaper when she calculated that a child could have a €140,000 nest egg by the age of 18 if both parents deposited the full yearly tax-free amount from birth in an account growing at a rate of three per cent annually. A child in the country’s 219,996 one-parent families could not hope for even half that amount.
Prejudice against single people pervades society. Anecdotes abound about how those minus a ready-made plus one get invited to fewer dinner parties because they unbalance the seating arrangement or, worse, they might run off with someone’s spouse after the port and stilton. “You don’t fit in”, goes the message. Ours is a matrimanic culture where the married-two-kids family rules. That culture was bolstered last year when more than a million voters rejected the referendum proposing to expand the constitutional definition of family beyond the married kind. Singlism is the great unacknowledged survivor of the war on -isms. In the last census, 23 per cent of Irish households comprised a sole occupant and yet they remain invisible in the realm of public policies and practices.
Residential property prices are so high that young people need two incomes to afford a home in many parts of Dublin or, for that matter, Cork and Galway. Just ask the 522,486 adults still living with their parents why they’re not coupled up in their own love nests.
Singletons fortunate enough to have a home of their own need only venture as far as the supermarket for the next belt of a baton from the how-dare-you-live-alone police. The shelves are stacked with the extra bill for the one-person household. See the packet of five plain bagels with a best before date in two days’ time. That special offer of three packets of pork medallions for €9 looks tasty, except there are four fillets in each packet. Pigs will fly before you get to eat all 12 of them. On a recent shopping expedition, the only free-range chicken breasts available were in packs of three. The courgettes came in pairs. It would be courgette for breakfast, dinner and tea in the one-person home.
If businesses and governments won’t think of the singletons, they might at least think of the planet. Food waste depletes resources and degrades the soil. According to earth.org, it accounts for one-third of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.
The total number of people living alone when the 2022 census was taken (425,974) had risen by seven per cent since the 2016 census. The signs are that the number will continue to rise. It’s past time for the establishment to drop its JD Vance-esque “childless cat ladies” derision of those who live alone and start planning for the future of shrinking households.
