The scene opens ... it is early summer in Connemara. Dusk is falling. A black Range Rover with 27 D plates approaches Roundstone from the east. The driver slows, dims the lights and pulls over. The woman in the passenger side turns around and speaks to her two children in the back seat.
“Okay, kids, let’s go over it again in case we are stopped by the men ... ”
“Where are we going?” she asks.
“To Clifden.”
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“Where are we staying?”
“The Clifden Arms Hotel.”
“Good.”
The woman turns back to the man. “What if they don’t believe us?”
“It’s cool. I have made an online booking. We can cancel it when we get to the cottage,” he replies before driving off.
“Why don’t the men want us to go to our holiday cottage, Mummy?” the girl asks. The woman pauses before answering quietly: “They have nowhere to live, and they think it’s our fault”.
“Is it our fault?” the girl asks.
The driver responds: “No ... it’s the Government’s.”
Apologies to Paul Lynch and all other authors of post-apocalyptic fiction. The idea of roadblocks in Connemara to stop people getting to their holiday homes admittedly stretches credulity.
But until Wednesday the idea that a senior manager in neighbouring Mayo County Council would call for a boycott of holiday homeowners might have seemed equally so. The fact that he was taken seriously – to the point of him being interviewed on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland – takes it closer to the level of plausibility.
In case you missed it, Tom Gilligan, the council’s director of services with responsibility for housing and roads, emailed his colleagues in the local authority’s strategic policy committee (SPC) over the weekend floating the idea of a boycott in the context of the housing shortage in the county.
“So, the objective around this proposed boycott is to highlight the impact of underused housing stock on local communities, encourage policy reform and taxation measures on vacant second homes. And also, to push holiday homeowners to either return properties for sale to the rental market or to the long-term rental market,” he told RTÉ.
The thing about Gilligan’s comments is that – as was said about Donald Trump during his first term – they should be taken seriously but not literally. Like Trump at his most intuitive, Gilligan has tapped into the resentment of a group that understandably feels its voice is not being heard. It is galling to be surrounded by homes that are unoccupied for much of the year in the middle of a housing crisis.
In Trump’s case, it was blue-collar, rural Americans – mostly men. In Gilligan’s case, it’s people in rural Ireland who can’t find a place for themselves, or their children, to live.
While both Trump and Gilligan have identified a group with legitimate grievances, neither seems to have a workable solution to their problems.
Trump’s first-term efforts at protectionism were stymied by others in his party and Government, but the second time around he launched his disastrous tariff policy.
Gilligan’s proposed boycott is misguided and even less likely to succeed than the tariffs. But Gilligan has hit on a word that encodes the anger of those who might agree with him.
As Gilligan pointed out, the word “boycott” is synonymous with Mayo and the late 19th century protests against landlord Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott. “The local community at the time took it upon themselves to try a form of civil protest ... It’s very important that we should never doubt that a small group of thoughtful and committed citizens can change the world,” he told RTÉ.
It will be telling to see where Gilligan’s idea goes from here. It will no doubt find favour with some frustrated people in the west of Ireland, but also the ragtag group of charlatans who comprise the far right.
If the idea of protest – rather than the unworkable concept of a boycott – does gain some traction with the wider community in Mayo, then this serious local issue could come on to the national agenda.
We shouldn’t discount the possibility. Gilligan boasts an impressive CV and is very different from the angry self-publicists who spread their poison on social media. A qualified accountant with a MBA in local government from DCU, he has held various posts in the public service and the private sector.
He is also the founder of VacantHomes.ie, a national housing initiative developed to get empty/derelict homes back into use.
The real takeaway – particularly for holiday homeowners with Range Rovers – is that they underestimate at their peril the level of simmering anger felt by people who are locked out of the housing market in parts of the country where homes sit empty for much of the year.
