It is interesting how insulation has become a bit of a national obsession all of a sudden, writes Anne Marie Hourihane
PRESUMABLY A lot of the strategies that we are developing for coping with the recession are unconscious. Presumably also, a lot of them have come disguised as new year's resolutions. A friend has resolved to go to the cinema more in 2009 - escape, warmth, almost total darkness, you have to say that the cinema is good value - but not many of us are as smart as she is. We seem to be stuck somewhere between resolving to give up eating out and resolving to give up eating.
It is interesting though how insulation has become a bit of an obsession all of a sudden. It can't all be down to the fact that the Government's new Building Energy Rating (BER) has come into law.
Those energy-saving light bulbs cast everything into a suicidal gloom but insulation sounds altogether nicer. Insulation is all about keeping the bad stuff out and the good stuff in. Insulation involves enough fleecy padding to weave a busload of adults a capacious comfort blanket a piece. Insulating your house is also a sure sign that you are actually going to make it your home, as opposed to flogging it or renting it out to some unsuspecting stranger. Insulation is about wrapping up what you've got and taking to heart that lovely Irish maxim, what we have we hold. Even though the winter weather has been unusually sharp this year it is doubtful whether your ordinary adult ran round the house with quite so much purpose last year, wedging curtains behind laundry baskets (don't ask) and trying to sandbag the front door with old bath mats.
It's not as if the cold is a new phenomenon here, so it must simply be that we are feeling it more. In fact it's a bit of a mystery as to why the Irish in this green, damp and windswept land have never taken to insulation before.
Our neglect of insulation is similar to our national disdain for raincoats. We seem to have survived as a country by simply denying the climate, and this may be one of the many reasons that we love the car so much. Our cars mean that we can dress for a permanent, air-conditioned spring. Cars are definitely responsible for the strong sales of suede shoes. It is as if those of us who never physically left the country had emigrated mentally to California, like Flann O'Brien's De Selby, and firmly believe that we live there still. In the good times - were they only last year? - we were all content to live in, buy and build houses with as much insulation as your average kitchen colander. And not just in old buildings either. The only thing that made more noise than your own feet on your fashionable wooden floor was the sound of the wind howling under it and hissing through the skirting boards on all sides. Irish homes, with their wooden floors, their decks and their huge picture windows seem to have been designed for another continent.
It's really strange that in your normal city home - a 1950s semi-detached, say, or a small terraced house - you could have the heat blazing over the Christmas break for most of the day, only to wake up the next morning to find yourself back to zero on the thermostat. Why has it taken the Government's BER scheme to alert us to the fact that this is completely crazy?
And then there's the whole dreary business of the hearty types who tell us to conserve energy by wearing an extra sweater. And the lunatics who time their showers.
And the puritans who like to tell us about how they used to wake up with the ice thick on the inside of their bedroom windows and the glass of water frozen solid on the bedside table.
It's as if we believe that you have to suffer to be sensible, and that people are incapable of living nice lives in climates with cold winters, which would seem a bit harsh on the inhabitants of Scandinavia, northern Italy and large tracts of the US.
So we are certainly ready to embrace insulation. The main problem with the Government's BER scheme is not the scheme itself, but the word government.
Yesterday's Sunday Timespublished a disturbing report on severe discrepancies between the assessments of different BER inspectors who all surveyed the same house. This is not good news.
On the other hand to your average Irish person it will not come as any major surprise. If we can't have a consistent education system, or health system, providing the same standard of service across the country, how are we going to operate a system that will be consistent about attic insulation and solar panels? In the meantime let's get back to draught-proofing, double-glazing and trying to remember to turn off the immersion.
Maybe by the time we have wrapped our houses up really, really tight this whole recession thing will be over.