Mary Kenny
Nell McCafferty made an apt point when she participated in a discussion celebrating the centenary of the women’s vote on last weekend’s Sunday with Miriam. There was, Nell pointed out, a connection between pregnancy and housing – between mothers being able to celebrate a pregnancy and welcome a baby because they are in possession of a home. We should be able to celebrate pregnancy and provide the homes that women and families need.
Constance Markievicz herself couldn’t have put it better. She hoped – and believed – that an Irish Republic would mean an end to slums, and access to a home for every family.
And yet, the housing market is in crisis: we’ve seen yet another report from Daft, the property website, that rents in every county in Ireland rose over the last year – and that the average Dublin rented property is a staggering €1,822 per month. That is €380 higher than at the height of the Celtic Tiger. The trend was the same in Galway, Waterford – and Limerick, where rents have risen by 14%.
There are also a declining number of properties available to rent, and private landlords, according to Fintan McNamara of the Residential Landlords’ Association, are increasingly reluctant to invest in properties for rent because of the red tape and property taxes. He is also a continuing critic of the ban on bedsit flats which accelerated the shortage of budget accommodation.
Accommodation
Most people want to own their own homes – and that, too, is linked with starting a family, and hence with embarking on pregnancy: couples will defer marriage and children simply because the accommodation isn’t within their reach.
Yet, even in a property-owning democracy, there has to be a fluid market for rented accommodation, and it’s awful that things are in such a mess. It is blatantly obvious that the core problem is supply and demand: when there is a shortage, prices rise.
And Nell is surely right about the connection between pregnancy and housing. Let’s not forget that point.
Spare a thought for the sensitive souls of Hampstead, home of the famed Left-leaning North London intellectual, for many years represented in parliament by thespian Glenda Jackson.
There’s an anguished conflict over whether transgender swimmers (male to female) may be allowed to use the all-female Hampstead Kenwood Ladies’ Pond.
According to equality laws, transgender persons should have swimming access. But there is some dissent. “After all,” one genteel Hampstead female resident told me, “some of these transgendering people still have their gentlemen’s tackle.” Equality and diversity can pose such problems!
Not so liberating
John Redmond and the Irish Parliamentary Party are now disparaged because they did not support the Suffragettes’ campaign. Poor Redmond had his hands full trying to keep the IPP together after the Parnell split. He also had his hands tied by Herbert Asquith, the British Prime Minister and Liberal leader, who was opposed to votes for women because he thought it would destroy the Liberal party – and probably because his bossy wife, Margot, was an anti-suffragist. (She preferred power in the home to power in the Commons!)
Redmond wasn’t further endeared to the feminist cause after an English Suffragette threw an axe at Asquith and Redmond in Dublin in 1912. The hatchet lobbed off part of Redmond’s ear.
Herbert Asquith was wrong to oppose women’s suffrage – the cause could have been won peacefully if he had given it support. And yet, for his own political party, he was prescient. After women got the full franchise in 1928, the Liberal Party never held power again, and is now a small minority party.