“You’re not going to find rents are lower in New York, or it’s easier to buy a house in Sydney. It might be the case if you go to a very rural area, or a third- or fourth-tier city. That can be true in Ireland too. So, you know, sometimes the grass looks greener. It’s not the case that more Irish people are leaving Ireland than are coming home. Actually, more Irish citizens are coming home. The grass can look greener. Considering emigration is not the same as doing it, and many do come back.”
There are plenty of examples of Leo Varadkar’s “well, actually” style of callousness, but I thought a recent interview he did with Gavan Reilly on Newstalk was frankly alarming. How could anyone spin that line in this context, while young people are being forced to leave the country because Irish rents are out of control?
Reilly put it to him that the vast majority of those aged under 25 in Ireland are considering emigrating because they would have a better standard of living and more affordable housing elsewhere. These young people are experiencing and reacting to a reality, and they will not be comforted by Varadkar’s fantasy that they are somehow misguided, that they are only imagining rent is cheaper elsewhere, and that they should hang about and suffer. It’s very easy to splice and dice things to bolster one’s ideology. But this reflex denies reality. It might sound smart in party meetings, and to the graph-boys of Twitter, but to everyone else it is cold, mean gaslighting.
Varadkar’s use of examples of New York (one of the most expensive places to rent in the world, but still easier to find a place to live than it is in Dublin, often at comparative prices), and Sydney (where property is totally overvalued, making it one of the hardest cities globally to buy a home) was strategic and also telling. He could have cited countless other cities young Irish people are leaving for every day – London, Manchester, Glasgow, Berlin, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Lisbon, Hamburg, Brussels, on and on we go – but that wouldn’t have served his shoddy argument and his schoolboy debate-level “point of information” approach to a crisis that is causing untold suffering.
The thing about the housing crisis in Ireland is that when a crisis becomes this acute it doesn’t stay in its lane. It bleeds out in all sorts of ways. The housing crisis is causing resentment around the refugee crisis, and plenty of nefarious people are using it as leverage to stoke racism. The housing crisis causes and exacerbates a national mental health crisis. It leaves people in states of stress and distress, angry and hopeless. It diminishes people’s confidence and sense of self-worth. The housing crisis causes an existential issue for people who work hard but still can’t afford to live in the place they were reared. It makes people feel as though they have failed at life. That is a terrible thing to do to people. The housing crisis causes familial tension, with adults well into their 30s forced to move home. The housing crisis exacerbates fertility issues, as young couples delay having families because they have no place to raise a child.
The housing crisis puts pressure on the urban education system, because young teachers cannot afford to live in Irish cities, and either emigrate or move to rural areas. The housing crisis wears down students in colleges and universities, who arrive to lectures exhausted from long commutes. The housing crisis makes young people feel rejected by their own country. These are people who want to make a life here but are forced to emigrate because they can’t afford to rent a room.
This breaks community ties and disconnects groups of friends. The housing crisis puts pressure on our health system because young nurses can’t afford to live close to hospitals. The housing crisis has shattered the social contract. The feeling at protests is of course anger, but it’s also sadness. The crisis has led to a sort of social depression hanging over the country.
Varadkar said in the interview: “I think we should base our opinions on official figures, not on stories.” I think that speaks to a reluctance to acknowledge the human cost of what is happening. What is so wrong with expressing sympathy and empathy towards those who are suffering? Listening to people’s stories is not irrelevant. It is human. Perhaps if the victims of terrible housing policies were listened to, things would be different. What a privilege to view the housing crisis as simply academic, merely a matter of figures, graphs and reports, and not of real lives.
Last week saw the worst homelessness figures ever, including nearly 3,500 children who will spend Christmas in emergency accommodation. This is a catastrophe. It is a humanitarian emergency. Last Friday night, when the country gathered to watch the Late Late Toy Show, I thought of those children in crowded hotel rooms and hostels, sleeping on couches or in shared beds. Stop telling people their experiences aren’t real. The people living the housing crisis aren’t the ones imagining things. It’s the version of events from government that’s the fantasy.
Yeah, he’s a prick.
very good article that summarises the costs of the housing emergency… Leo is a little snide prick
I think it’s to gaslight the people who can turn a blind to it. The article did a good job of highlighting how it affects people though. If you’re someone who lives at home or can’t find anyone to live closer to your job. You’re not sitting there thinking ‘I guess Leo is right, it’s tough to live anywhere’. If you’re someone who has their own house or doesn’t need to worry about it, you might have more sympathy and taking the viewpoint of ‘it’s a tough issue’, ‘can’t fix it overnight’.
The fact the government are already behind on targets for building means they don’t really have a handle on it still. Honestly if everyone had housing as their #1 issue. FG would be wiped out in next election. There’s just a good chunk of the population who doesn’t have to worry about it.
Why is this tagged “Moaning Michael”? This is an opinion piece from a news outlet, not a post by somebody complaining on this sub.
It’s worth taking a chance to remember FG’s response to the last time people were emigrating. According to Michael Noonan, it was a lifestyle choice, and apparently Enda expected that people would uproot their entire existence to move back to Ireland in 2020 having just spent the better part of a decade making a life in another place.
Doesn’t affect him or his well off pals so he can say everything is fine. Those people will believe him and it gets them out of any hint of feeling guilty that may have crept into their stony hearts. Meanwhile everyone else goes back to being ignored
You know things are fucking grim out on the streets when it’s making Una Mulally turn in reasonable pieces.
She’s completely right on this issue. Leo knows exactly what he’s doing with that statement he made. It wasn’t aimed at the young people at all but aimed at the elements of his base who might be feeling guilty at their naked exploitation of the youth.
Gotta convince them the youth have it easy here so they can keep exploiting them with a clear conscience.
Lots of FG are pleased Varadkar is the target of criticism. Probably a few in FF too. It misses the point. This is FFG policy.
Leo’s style of commentary has always been like this. Whenever he gets posed a question he gaslights and strawmans his way out of it.
Why do people whose entire future is gone because of him and the governments deliberate policies, allow him to get away with such statements cost-free?
He’s getting ready to militarize Ireland’s police force, guys…
I voted for FG in 2016 and I will never vote for them again. What a complete scumbag.
For Leo and his friends it’s not a crisis, its policy working as intended.
I pay over 2k a month to rent an apartment.
In most overpriced property market in the world – in the best location, and it’s massive.
I hate Una’s general brand but when she’s right she’s right
What drives me fucking nuts is the comparison of Dublin to cities like Sydney, New York, London or Toronto.
Dublin is a fraction the size and population of these major cities, we are not their comparators at all. There is vastly more things to do, see, work at or get involved in in those cities whereas Dublin for me, as a 27 year old, is now basically just Camden/Dawson/Baggot Street.
I don’t even go drinking on the weekend anymore because it’s the same five decent pubs and two clubs on rotation. It’s a fucking joke. At least if I was paying the same rent in New York, I would have basically endless options for nightlife, restaurants, clubs and activities.
Tl;Dr: he’s a prick.
The comparison between major cities like NYC, Sydney etc is silly to me. Before moving here, I used to live in a german city with 1+ million people, so about double of Dublin. Could afford to rent at least a nice studio apartment for a fraction of what they cost here.
​
Edit: I’ve been corrected on the amount of people living in Dublin (aka about 1.26 million), so almost the same as where I lived, with unfortunately 2x or 3x the rent cost.
The logic is very clear— if ~30% of households are rented, that means the other 70% should be fine, not to mention the renting population is waaay less likely to vote and don’t need to be cared about.
To FG it’s a lot easier to just throw money at the population elsewhere, hope the transfer of public funds into private hands work out for them in the next election and if it doesn’t, well, the burning hole in the budget will be SF’s problem to deal with anyway.
Narcissists should not be allowed in positions of power where their decisions affect human lives.
Absolute fucking gobshite from one of two gobshite parties.
Can’t way to vote the whole shower of them out.
What do you expect from the leader of a party that couldn’t possibly tax a person’s home because it was morally unjust and unfair. I’ll never understand the insanity of anyone voting for FG or FF
I was thinking it’s not just young people suffering, how many people in abusive relationships, in separated marriages unable to move on? They can’t have their children living in a shared apartment? There is nowhere for people to go.
Want clowns like him to know how bad the housing crisis and cost of living is? Have them spend a week, maybe even a month on minimum wage, have them look for a house to rent and then they’ll see how bad things are and how out of touch they are.
Una hitting the nail on the head again.
​
he doesnt even bother hiding his contempt for the poors.
he is a Grade A cunt. smug, overpaid and talentless. i hope he is forced out of politics next election
Rent in new york city is cheaper than Dublin and easier to find. Manhattan is more expensive but apartments can be found if you have the income unlike Dublin but if you go to the other Boroughs Queens, the bronx and brooklyn you can get cheaper. Contact any irish person in NYC the vast majority live in Queens and the Bronx and are paying reasonable rents
would it be accurate to say that the majority of FFG are in the pocket of those who are exacerbating the house crisis i.e. landlords, developers etc.?
Stick him in a bed sit, a mouldy bedroom or a four bedroom house with 16 beds and one bathroom and see how he likes it
The man is a moron. I work in a hotel. In the last 6 months we’ve had 8 staff leave to emigrate to Australia and Canada and another 12 to 16 foreign nationals have returned home to their home country or gone to another country because it’s cheaper to live elsewhere. The reality he and his ilk are living in is astounding if they think that everything is hunky Dory in this country. It’s not. It’s a fucking shitshow and it’s all down to him and his corrupt, self serving cronies in the Dáil. Sooner people wake up and stop voting them in the better
Take this anger you feel towards these cunts and vote them out
What Ireland needs is building dense mixed usage neighborhoods with offices with good transportation to them on the outskirts of the city. Dublin is too centric. That’s a problem. It causes long commutes and congestion
31 comments
“You’re not going to find rents are lower in New York, or it’s easier to buy a house in Sydney. It might be the case if you go to a very rural area, or a third- or fourth-tier city. That can be true in Ireland too. So, you know, sometimes the grass looks greener. It’s not the case that more Irish people are leaving Ireland than are coming home. Actually, more Irish citizens are coming home. The grass can look greener. Considering emigration is not the same as doing it, and many do come back.”
There are plenty of examples of Leo Varadkar’s “well, actually” style of callousness, but I thought a recent interview he did with Gavan Reilly on Newstalk was frankly alarming. How could anyone spin that line in this context, while young people are being forced to leave the country because Irish rents are out of control?
Reilly put it to him that the vast majority of those aged under 25 in Ireland are considering emigrating because they would have a better standard of living and more affordable housing elsewhere. These young people are experiencing and reacting to a reality, and they will not be comforted by Varadkar’s fantasy that they are somehow misguided, that they are only imagining rent is cheaper elsewhere, and that they should hang about and suffer. It’s very easy to splice and dice things to bolster one’s ideology. But this reflex denies reality. It might sound smart in party meetings, and to the graph-boys of Twitter, but to everyone else it is cold, mean gaslighting.
Varadkar’s use of examples of New York (one of the most expensive places to rent in the world, but still easier to find a place to live than it is in Dublin, often at comparative prices), and Sydney (where property is totally overvalued, making it one of the hardest cities globally to buy a home) was strategic and also telling. He could have cited countless other cities young Irish people are leaving for every day – London, Manchester, Glasgow, Berlin, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Lisbon, Hamburg, Brussels, on and on we go – but that wouldn’t have served his shoddy argument and his schoolboy debate-level “point of information” approach to a crisis that is causing untold suffering.
The thing about the housing crisis in Ireland is that when a crisis becomes this acute it doesn’t stay in its lane. It bleeds out in all sorts of ways. The housing crisis is causing resentment around the refugee crisis, and plenty of nefarious people are using it as leverage to stoke racism. The housing crisis causes and exacerbates a national mental health crisis. It leaves people in states of stress and distress, angry and hopeless. It diminishes people’s confidence and sense of self-worth. The housing crisis causes an existential issue for people who work hard but still can’t afford to live in the place they were reared. It makes people feel as though they have failed at life. That is a terrible thing to do to people. The housing crisis causes familial tension, with adults well into their 30s forced to move home. The housing crisis exacerbates fertility issues, as young couples delay having families because they have no place to raise a child.
The housing crisis puts pressure on the urban education system, because young teachers cannot afford to live in Irish cities, and either emigrate or move to rural areas. The housing crisis wears down students in colleges and universities, who arrive to lectures exhausted from long commutes. The housing crisis makes young people feel rejected by their own country. These are people who want to make a life here but are forced to emigrate because they can’t afford to rent a room.
This breaks community ties and disconnects groups of friends. The housing crisis puts pressure on our health system because young nurses can’t afford to live close to hospitals. The housing crisis has shattered the social contract. The feeling at protests is of course anger, but it’s also sadness. The crisis has led to a sort of social depression hanging over the country.
Varadkar said in the interview: “I think we should base our opinions on official figures, not on stories.” I think that speaks to a reluctance to acknowledge the human cost of what is happening. What is so wrong with expressing sympathy and empathy towards those who are suffering? Listening to people’s stories is not irrelevant. It is human. Perhaps if the victims of terrible housing policies were listened to, things would be different. What a privilege to view the housing crisis as simply academic, merely a matter of figures, graphs and reports, and not of real lives.
Last week saw the worst homelessness figures ever, including nearly 3,500 children who will spend Christmas in emergency accommodation. This is a catastrophe. It is a humanitarian emergency. Last Friday night, when the country gathered to watch the Late Late Toy Show, I thought of those children in crowded hotel rooms and hostels, sleeping on couches or in shared beds. Stop telling people their experiences aren’t real. The people living the housing crisis aren’t the ones imagining things. It’s the version of events from government that’s the fantasy.
Yeah, he’s a prick.
very good article that summarises the costs of the housing emergency… Leo is a little snide prick
I think it’s to gaslight the people who can turn a blind to it. The article did a good job of highlighting how it affects people though. If you’re someone who lives at home or can’t find anyone to live closer to your job. You’re not sitting there thinking ‘I guess Leo is right, it’s tough to live anywhere’. If you’re someone who has their own house or doesn’t need to worry about it, you might have more sympathy and taking the viewpoint of ‘it’s a tough issue’, ‘can’t fix it overnight’.
The fact the government are already behind on targets for building means they don’t really have a handle on it still. Honestly if everyone had housing as their #1 issue. FG would be wiped out in next election. There’s just a good chunk of the population who doesn’t have to worry about it.
Why is this tagged “Moaning Michael”? This is an opinion piece from a news outlet, not a post by somebody complaining on this sub.
It’s worth taking a chance to remember FG’s response to the last time people were emigrating. According to Michael Noonan, it was a lifestyle choice, and apparently Enda expected that people would uproot their entire existence to move back to Ireland in 2020 having just spent the better part of a decade making a life in another place.
Doesn’t affect him or his well off pals so he can say everything is fine. Those people will believe him and it gets them out of any hint of feeling guilty that may have crept into their stony hearts. Meanwhile everyone else goes back to being ignored
You know things are fucking grim out on the streets when it’s making Una Mulally turn in reasonable pieces.
She’s completely right on this issue. Leo knows exactly what he’s doing with that statement he made. It wasn’t aimed at the young people at all but aimed at the elements of his base who might be feeling guilty at their naked exploitation of the youth.
Gotta convince them the youth have it easy here so they can keep exploiting them with a clear conscience.
Lots of FG are pleased Varadkar is the target of criticism. Probably a few in FF too. It misses the point. This is FFG policy.
Leo’s style of commentary has always been like this. Whenever he gets posed a question he gaslights and strawmans his way out of it.
Why do people whose entire future is gone because of him and the governments deliberate policies, allow him to get away with such statements cost-free?
He’s getting ready to militarize Ireland’s police force, guys…
I voted for FG in 2016 and I will never vote for them again. What a complete scumbag.
For Leo and his friends it’s not a crisis, its policy working as intended.
I pay over 2k a month to rent an apartment.
In most overpriced property market in the world – in the best location, and it’s massive.
I hate Una’s general brand but when she’s right she’s right
What drives me fucking nuts is the comparison of Dublin to cities like Sydney, New York, London or Toronto.
Dublin is a fraction the size and population of these major cities, we are not their comparators at all. There is vastly more things to do, see, work at or get involved in in those cities whereas Dublin for me, as a 27 year old, is now basically just Camden/Dawson/Baggot Street.
I don’t even go drinking on the weekend anymore because it’s the same five decent pubs and two clubs on rotation. It’s a fucking joke. At least if I was paying the same rent in New York, I would have basically endless options for nightlife, restaurants, clubs and activities.
Tl;Dr: he’s a prick.
The comparison between major cities like NYC, Sydney etc is silly to me. Before moving here, I used to live in a german city with 1+ million people, so about double of Dublin. Could afford to rent at least a nice studio apartment for a fraction of what they cost here.
​
Edit: I’ve been corrected on the amount of people living in Dublin (aka about 1.26 million), so almost the same as where I lived, with unfortunately 2x or 3x the rent cost.
The logic is very clear— if ~30% of households are rented, that means the other 70% should be fine, not to mention the renting population is waaay less likely to vote and don’t need to be cared about.
To FG it’s a lot easier to just throw money at the population elsewhere, hope the transfer of public funds into private hands work out for them in the next election and if it doesn’t, well, the burning hole in the budget will be SF’s problem to deal with anyway.
Narcissists should not be allowed in positions of power where their decisions affect human lives.
Absolute fucking gobshite from one of two gobshite parties.
Can’t way to vote the whole shower of them out.
What do you expect from the leader of a party that couldn’t possibly tax a person’s home because it was morally unjust and unfair. I’ll never understand the insanity of anyone voting for FG or FF
I was thinking it’s not just young people suffering, how many people in abusive relationships, in separated marriages unable to move on? They can’t have their children living in a shared apartment? There is nowhere for people to go.
Want clowns like him to know how bad the housing crisis and cost of living is? Have them spend a week, maybe even a month on minimum wage, have them look for a house to rent and then they’ll see how bad things are and how out of touch they are.
Una hitting the nail on the head again.
​
he doesnt even bother hiding his contempt for the poors.
he is a Grade A cunt. smug, overpaid and talentless. i hope he is forced out of politics next election
Rent in new york city is cheaper than Dublin and easier to find. Manhattan is more expensive but apartments can be found if you have the income unlike Dublin but if you go to the other Boroughs Queens, the bronx and brooklyn you can get cheaper. Contact any irish person in NYC the vast majority live in Queens and the Bronx and are paying reasonable rents
would it be accurate to say that the majority of FFG are in the pocket of those who are exacerbating the house crisis i.e. landlords, developers etc.?
Stick him in a bed sit, a mouldy bedroom or a four bedroom house with 16 beds and one bathroom and see how he likes it
The man is a moron. I work in a hotel. In the last 6 months we’ve had 8 staff leave to emigrate to Australia and Canada and another 12 to 16 foreign nationals have returned home to their home country or gone to another country because it’s cheaper to live elsewhere. The reality he and his ilk are living in is astounding if they think that everything is hunky Dory in this country. It’s not. It’s a fucking shitshow and it’s all down to him and his corrupt, self serving cronies in the Dáil. Sooner people wake up and stop voting them in the better
Take this anger you feel towards these cunts and vote them out
What Ireland needs is building dense mixed usage neighborhoods with offices with good transportation to them on the outskirts of the city. Dublin is too centric. That’s a problem. It causes long commutes and congestion