Rosie (2021) BBC3, BBCiPlayer, Script by Roddie Doyle, Director Paddy Breathnach.

Rosie (2021) BBC3, BBCiPlayer, Script by Roddie Doyle, Director Paddy Breathnach.

 https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p09lk76z/rosie

Roddy Doyle makes you smile. You just need to think of that line from The Commitments, ‘We are the black men of…’ whatever it was. I’m never that grand at remembering. He wrote about the housing crisis in Dublin. But they can’t be that bad that Conor McGregor threatens to lead a posse of Irishmen to deal with the immigrant problem. Whisper it, I could claim an Irish passport too. I’m an immigrant of an emigrant, or something like that. Anyway, I like my Guinness.

Until recently, we gloried in a reading of history and the title of THE MOST OPPRESSED PEOPLE EVER.

We all know about the Irish Famine years. British indifference. Coffin ships. The Irish Diaspora and an Irish population that hovered around 7 million, yet in the 1950s and 1960s was still exporting its working men and women and was largely a rural society with half the population of 100 years earlier. Irish men and women were everywhere. They were Gone With the Wind. Sure, wasn’t Scarlett O’Hara being courted by another Irishman, Rhett Butler, who’d won his lowly estate by cheating at cards and winning a Southern Plantation?    

Rosie (Sarah Greene) is our Scarlett O’Hara of the Dublin rental sector while trying to sort out housing—over 36 hours—for her three kids, while being on benefits, which brings little benefit, and only grief. Her husband is no Rhett Butler. John Paul (Moe Dunford) leaves her to it. He tries to work as many hours as God sends in the infernal underworld of Dublin’s kitchens.  

The message here for those that missed the link is how letting the market sort things out is darkest doublethink, whilst helping take a hammer to poor people’s lives.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/11/ireland-housing-crisis-far-right-europe-refugees

The average Dublin rent is now €2,102 a month. That is equivalent to the entire monthly take-home pay of a newly qualified teacher. Since 2015, rents have increased by 13% across the euro area, but in Ireland they’ve increased by 60%. And this is despite a rent cap on existing rental tenancies.

[creation of rentier class]

Spiralling rents are directly connected to the fact that most of the new-build housing supply is expensive, investor-fund build-to-rent, backed by government through tax breaks and incentives. In 2022, 58% of all newly built homes in greater Dublin were bought or developed by investor funds. Countless people are being locked out of buying a home by the reliance on these global vulture funds. I prefer to call them vampire funds because they seek not to buy and sell, but to extract high rents in perpetuity.

Roddy Doyle (2021) Life Without Children.

Life Without Children, ten short stories, set during Covid and Lockdown they’re readable, but unremarkable. I’ve already forgotten them before I read the last story. Something about memes and a man searching the streets of Dublin for his son.  Doyle’s a Booker Prize winner. He isn’t going to come back and bite you on the arse. Being the son of an immigrant means you don’t have to arse-lick. Nobody cares what you think. I don’t jump in like Conor McGregor. I question when I read books like this, if they posted these stories to various agencies and competitions, how would they fare? You tell me—not about Roddy Doyle’s achievements—about Life Without Children? I’d love a little of that magic dust. And yes, that’s being small-minded. Read on.