20 years on and Middle Ireland is betrayed again

THE house prices report showing that a couple would need a combined basic salary of €127,000 to afford a new three-bedroom semi in Dublin is not perhaps as shocking as its authors pretend. True, it means that with the average wage in this country running at around €53,000, home ownership in Dublin, and indeed Galway and Cork, is ‘virtually impossible’ for young people unless, like lucky Leo, they can draw on the bank of mum and dad for a slice of their deposit.

But it’s not as if we haven’t been here before, is it? A few years before the financial crash, as property prices went through the roof and banks ramped up their residential lending, the then leader of the Opposition, Enda Kenny, bemoaned how gardaí and nurses, the backbone of Middle Ireland and the wellspring of the country’s professional life, were being priced out of the property market.

Pointing out that for the first time in the history of the State, a garda married to a nurse could not afford the basic dream of home ownership, Kenny accused Bertie Ahern’s government of a great betrayal.

Now, 18 years after Enda’s gloomy commentary on the state of the nation, it seems we have come full circle and the offspring of, let’s call her Nurse Sandra and Garda Eamon, both now in advanced middle age, are in the same bind.

IN FACT, they are worse off because Sandra and Eamon, who managed to squeak onto the property ladder before the market went gangbusters, were able to put a roof over their children’s heads when many of their colleagues could not. The only drawback was that house prices forced them to buy at the edge of the commuter belt in Rochfortbridge, Co. Westmeath, where new builds were mushrooming and local services like schools and shops struggled to catch up.

Although Sandra and Eamon knew nothing about the place before moving there, they loved their new house and enjoyed investing in all the Celtic Tiger essentials like decking and patio heaters.

It was just a pity they didn’t get much time to enjoy it, what with leaving at 6am every day to drop the children to creche before the long commute to Dublin, and arriving back home in the dark.

The banking crash put them into negative equity for a time; the couple also worried about their housing development turning into a ghost estate, making their home unsaleable and robbing them of their plan to trade up eventually and move closer to their families. But they consoled themselves that their two secure and pensionable jobs gave them a safety net that was the envy of their friends who feared repossession and being put out on street. Looking back, they were hard times.

Almost 20 years later and Sandra and Eamon are survivors of the crash while their three children are grown up, in recession-proof jobs like their parents’ but better paid. Their son is in tech while one daughter is a primary school teacher and the other an accountant.

But all of them live abroad; the teacher is in Dubai and the other two are in Sydney. They are escaping the stratospheric Dublin rents that prevent them from saving for a deposit and turn home ownership into such a pipe dream that they can’t give much thought to settling down.

Like most parents of emigrant children, Eamon and Sandra hope that their children will come home eventually. Their daughter in

Dubai says that her tax-free earnings from school will allow her to get the money together for an apartment relatively quickly, but the two in Australia see no reason to return yet.

Next week, Eamon and Sandra are flying out to Sydney for Christmas and the whole family will spend the day together on the beach. But it doesn’t feel Christmassy in the 30C heat and on the other side of the world, such a long way from home.