Rented tellies are a thing of the past, as are dreams of a home

FORGIVE me if I’ve told you this before, and it’s entirely possible I have, but when I was growing up, in the Seventies, there was a joke about the difference between the Irish people and Germans. Germans, it went, rented their homes and bought their televisions, while the Irish bought their homes and rented their televisions.

For those of you who remember, RTV Rentals was a huge operation, and you rented your television – and, later, video cassette recorders – by the week or month.

My parents were paying the loan on a tenant purchase house from Dún Laoghaire Corporation, as Dún LaoghaireRathdown County Council was known then, so, of course, we rented a telly, from Murdoch’s, a local electrical store.

Nowadays, many young people don’t bother owning a television at all, because anything they want to watch can be streamed on their computers and they don’t need to shell out €160 a year for a licence. The sad fact of life, though, is that owning their own home now seems like an unattainable dream, certainly for anyone attempting to purchase alone.

Emigration

This week, a poll revealed that nine in ten young adults aged 18-24 believe they will never be able to afford a place to call their own and half of them are considering emigrating within the next year. That would see a boom in the numbers departing unlike anything we have witnessed since the 2008 crash, or the economically stagnant Eighties.

Both of those waves were created by unemployment, the former largely down to the collapse of the construction boom and the latter down to the general malaise that affected almost every sector of the economy.

What is most depressing about talk of emigration now is that we have full employment. These people have jobs. Some of them have very well-paid jobs – and yet they still can’t afford to buy houses and certainly not alone.

The number of properties purchased jointly increased from 47% in 2010 to 60.3% in 2021. Over the same period, the median age of those who purthemselves chased on their own rose from 34 to 41. That number does not relate solely to first-time buyers and probably includes individuals emerging from marital or other long-term relationships who have to start anew alone, but there surely are a lot of firsttime buyers in there.

How could it possibly be attractive for anyone in their late teens or early 20s to look on at the prospect of waiting what amounts to almost half their working life before they can even apply for a mortgage?

Every now and then, you will see someone famous, a celebrity or a politician, trot out the line that if twenty-somethings didn’t go on two foreign holidays a year, brought coffee to work in a flask instead of buying €3 lattes and cut down on the avocado toast, they could afford a deposit.

That, no doubt is true, if they managed to abstain from such pleasures for, oh, around 74-anda-half years; cutting out that latte on five work days a week for 47 work weeks a year would save you €705, while the average deposit needed to buy a house now is €52,500. Rising mortgage repayments certainly don’t help, with Bank of Ireland the latest to jack its fixed interest rate by three-quarters of one percentage point, from 3.15 to 3.9%.

The era of cheap money is well and truly over.

The problem for this generation is that the significant majority have grown up in owneroccupied homes, while they are more likely to be renting. They will, no doubt, have heard sage advice from their parents about how rent is dead money and why saving like demons is the best thing they can do. They’re trapped, though, because how can they save when rents continue to increase?

Ironically, owning their own homes may be possible only when those urging them to do so, their mothers and fathers, sadly pass away and leave an inheritance that finally pushes them over the line.

Of course, many younger people do manage to cobble the money together, but they tend to be in the best-paid jobs in the likes of tech, though that employment is now pretty precarious.

In my day, how much you earned dictated the sort of house you could buy and in what area, but it didn’t give you an advantage in buying full-stop. Those on lower incomes also could lower their sights and still find somewhere to buy.

Claptrap

Now, though, former council estates have become gentrified, and with gentrification comes price escalation.

One of my great-aunts lived in a terraced house on Oxmantown Road in Dublin’s Stoneybatter, and when we visited, we played on the street with other children in what then was a resolutely working-class area.

There is a house for sale there now, identical to hers, for €454,500. Two bedrooms…

Where I live in Co. Wexford, you’d get a solid four-bedroom house with a decent garden for €175,000 or more less than that, but if there is a daily commute to a job back in the capital, the toll on the wallet and on family life is immense.

We Irish, probably thanks to DNA memories of dispossession and discrimination, are wedded to the idea of property ownership. In recent years, the notion has been floated that this is sentimental claptrap, mostly by those who have most to benefit from turning us into a nation of renters rather than owners.

But the pull of looking around a house you own, one decorated to your own taste, one that offers security and continuity, a place that one day will be home to little humans too, is powerful and wholly understandable.

While it is often easy to mock the young, and say they’ve never had it better and remind them of what times were like for us growing up, the truth is that we have made them in our own image. If we craved ownership of our homes, we cannot criticise them for wanting exactly the same for themselves. It’s the Irish way.