In 1987, the then minister for foreign affairs Brian Lenihan notoriously dismissed concerns about the mass emigration of the young: “After all we can’t all live on a small island.” Since his claim had no literal truth, it could be understood only as a complacent acceptance of the existence of two kinds of Irish people. There was a possessor class that could indeed afford to live on the island. And there was a younger, dispossessed generation that had better seek its fortunes elsewhere.
No politician would be foolish enough to repeat Lenihan’s gauche phrase now. Yet it has an uncomfortable resonance for the present state of Ireland. One of the great challenges facing our society is its stark division, along generational lines, into possessors and dispossessed. There is a real and present danger that this divide will be as toxic for Irish politics as a similar rift over Brexit has been across the Irish Sea.
The great faultline is, of course, housing. The disastrous failure of housing policy means that the proportion of young people born in each decade since the 1960s who own the home they live in is decreasing.
Over 60 per cent of those born in the 1960s lived in a home they or their partner owned by the age of 30, whereas the comparable figure for those born in the 1970s was 39 per cent and, for those born in the early 1980s, 32 per cent. The other side of this reality is that young adults, even those with relatively decent jobs, are faced with the grim choice between continuing to live with their parents or paying rents so high that they cannot save for a mortgage. Average private rents in the Republic have almost doubled in 10 years, the Economic and Social Research Institute reported on Friday.
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This split between those who have property assets and those who do not is putting huge pressure on the intergenerational solidarity crucial to the survival of a healthy democracy. Public debate on key questions such as property taxes and pensions policy tends to be dominated by the older and more asset-rich age cohort. As a result, younger people have reason to feel that their voices are not being heard by the existing political power structures.
This division is not natural. Older people care passionately about the struggles of their own children and grandchildren. Young people are not innately hostile to the desires of their parents and grandparents for comfort and care. It is bad policy that is creating the potential for intergenerational antagonism. It is not too late for good policy – especially on housing, but also on, for example, tax reform – to prevent this loss of common purpose from being set in stone. We can all live on a small island, so long as we recognise that younger people have the same right to call it home their parents had.