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IT’S HARD TO know what lessons we can learn from watching the global economy crash, rebound and then crash again at the whim of one man whose motivations appear to be entirely vindictive.
Is it a good thing that our collective economic futures depend upon investors who clap like seals because a mad king decided to partially stay the apocalypse he’d been planning for us all? Who’s to say? Sure, it’s hard to imagine a stupider alternative than this, but maybe there is one.
Of course, the price of Trump’s epic climbdown on tariffs is his claim that dozens of countries had called him up to kiss his ass and beg for an economic reprieve. That’s Trump’s phrase by the way. During a dinner for Republicans on Tuesday, Trump said: “I’m telling you, these countries are calling us up, kissing my ass. They are. They are dying to make a deal.” Just in case you were wondering what tends to be going through his mind whenever we send a Taoiseach over there to hand him a bowl of shamrocks.
And we are by no means out of the woods yet, economically speaking. Certainly if we are to use the age-old tradition of assuming that good weather is a harbinger of doom (the first few months of the Covid pandemic, every Leaving Cert ever, etc) then the unseasonal mini-heatwave we are currently enjoying could spell the end times.
But on a purely political level, Trump has now proven to the rest of the world that there is no status quo for as long as he’s in the White House, and that trade norms which have stood for decades can no longer be relied upon. He is still firmly locked in a trade war with China, a state of affairs which will have major knock-on effects for the rest of us. Lastly, he’s yet to truly crack his knuckles on pharmaceutical tariffs which, if implemented, would affect Ireland in an outsized way. So don’t worry, there’s still plenty of reason to fear for your lives and livelihoods.
So was there anything going on this week that didn’t have Trump’s greasy handprints on it?
Well, it was confirmed that planning permission had been granted to convert 15 Usher’s Island – famous as the setting for James Joyce’s celebrated short story The Dead – into six apartments. For years now the future of the site has been in dispute, with many arguing that it should be preserved as a site of cultural significance.
A petition signed by 1,675 people had called on Dublin City Council to refuse planning permission for the development, and An Taisce had argued that the building “is of too great a cultural heritage importance for conversion to multiple apartments”. Too bad. A company owned by a former Monaghan GAA manager with the nickname Banty is ready to make some money off it.
The conversion of the house from Joyce’s Dubliners raises two problems. The first is the more obvious of the two: obviously it’s a shame to see a site of any cultural significance yanked out of its cosy place in our storied history and resituated in this modern, unromantic world.
But cultural erasure is not the only problem here. The conversion of 15 Usher’s Island into apartments belies the reality that there is no shortage of housing in Ireland, even as we prepare to steamroll and repave our literary history for the sake of more rental income for landlords. There is no shortage of short-term lets on Airbnb. There is certainly no shortage of derelict property. There is no shortage of means by which our society could provide housing without having to overwrite the artefacts of cultural significance that separate Dublin from any other city in Europe.
Ireland has the resources to protect its literary heritage at the same time as providing adequate access to housing for the public at large. We are doing neither of those things, instead opting to siphon Dublin’s cultural cache for the purpose of capitalising on a rental crisis.
It might cross your mind that some people are being a bit precious about all of this. After all, James Joyce did also write Ulysses. We do have a whole city to serve as a reminder of his literary genius, even without going on a walking tour. We even have an annual celebration where people who have either read, claim to have read, or are just weirdly enthusiastic about Ulysses dress up as characters from the book or Joyce himself and galavant around the town presumably speaking in a stream of consciousness style that makes them hard to hang out with. Surely we can forego one house, mentioned in one story?
But to reduce the loss of 15 Usher’s Island to mere sentimental wankery misses the point entirely. The public at large would almost certainly be a little bit more forgiving if this conversion wasn’t simply a footnote to the housing crisis that has become the defining story of modern Ireland. Maybe if there was any sense of a fair trade. “Okay, you can demolish a little bit of history as long as everyone has house”. That kind of thing.
Graham Doyle, the secretary general of the Department of Housing, this week said that Ireland would launch a “Housing for All 2.0 plan” in the coming months. One wonders what that plan might entail. Maybe we could find Billy Brennan’s barn from that Patrick Kavanagh poem, swing a wrecking ball through it and build a co-living space.
Alas, the fate of the house from The Dead is not part of any grand strategy to finally house everyone in Ireland. Instead, it marks a private, piecemeal addition of a half-dozen apartments to a housing supply in need of tens of thousands of units. The conversion of 15 Usher’s Island will do nothing to aid the housing crisis, and so its demise represents only a loss to Ireland’s cultural history, and an acceptance of Ireland’s cruel and austere modern-day.
And rents will continue to rise, upon all the living and the dead.
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