‼️ Gaffs by Rory Hearne ‼️

 55/∞

Why No One Can Get a House, and What We Can Do About it

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

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📚 Length: 352 pages

🔊Audiobook: 13 hours and 57 minutes

Why you should read this book?

💡This book talks about severity of Irish housing crisis.

💡 To learn about inhuman living conditions in Ireland.

💡 You’ll learn why Irish government does not want to solve it.

Gaff means house in Irish English. 🇨🇮 While Ireland appears to be one of the richest countries by GDP in the world, 🌍 in reality it is not. In reality, Ireland's GDP is just a little bit higher than GDP of the Czech Rep. Wages in Ireland are high, but rents are even higher. Dublin recently made it to the second place of the most expensive cities to live at in Europe after London. This review will be a personal one, because I left the last year the continental Europe for my master’s degree and went to Ireland. Despite the fact I managed to organise everything beforehand (to secure a job interview, an accommodation, the letter of acceptance from the university), I was hit hard by the Irish housing crisis, because of dodgy landlord. This sparkled up my interest of what the FUCK is going on in Ireland with housing market and why so many people are becoming homeless in Ireland.

The evil landlord has terminated my contract after 2,5 months after my arrival. It happened exactly at the moment when I started my master’s degree. I tried to get the extension, but the evil bastard wanted me out for no reason. I think he was mentally unstable, but I can only guess. Landlords like him should be prosecuted and sentenced to the life imprisonment! I would give him death penalty, but der Kaiser 👑 would be merciful. 

I wrote my dissertation about Landlord & Tenants rights. The problem with Irish protection of tenants is, that there is a very little protection until a tenant finishes certain time of the tenancy. Well, legally I got 3 months to move out while trying to hang on my job and university work. Although I was under massive pressure, It was manageable until the Christmas. After Christmas I was heading for a permanent burn out. My self-confidence was gone. I was walking cadaver. I left Ireland after staying for 1 year and 1 month - anything more than that could be fatal to my health. ☠️

…

When I was told my contract is terminated, I did not feel any pleasure, any sadness, I did not feel fuckin’ anything. I was just done. I was joking about suicide with my friends and there were some days I really wanted to die. I could not have imagined to fail my LL.M. and to lose 10 k EUR in tuition fees and come home like a hangdog. I was actually thinking about suicide every single day when I was in Ireland, because the suffering was unbearable.

But if you were born in Eastern Europe and you saw the omnipresent penury then mental health issues connected to housing insecurity are not really issues. They are just excuses for not being tough enough. Basically, if a man in Eastern Europe did not want to commit a suicide on a numerous occasions in his life when things did go wrong, he cannot be really considered a man.

When I had some free time, I just felt numb and went out only because of some really good friends of mine cared about me more than I cared about myself. Not knowing where I am going to live next month and how long I would be actually allowed to stay absolutely destroyed me!

Once I returned back home to the Czech Rep. 🇨🇿 I needed at least 2 months to recover to start to feel like a human being again. So my stay in Ireland was the absolute GULAG experience, all of that because of one single landlord and the lunatic Czech agency. They all should be punished, because this is not normal. But looking on the bigger picture, I am not the only one who is experiencing this in Ireland.

So what is going on and why Dr. Rory Hearne talks about it? Ireland has a shortage of decent accommodation. As the matter of fact it is nearly impossible to find a decent accommodation for a reasonable price. Locals do not suffer as much as migrants do, because migrants do not have friends who would offer them a decent room for 500 EUR / month. Studio for students at University Collage Dublin cost last year (2023-24) 1.100 EUR / month. For example when I studied in Germany at Universität Bayreuth, I paid for 1 room 295 EUR / month incl. internet in a newly build dorm just 1 year old. That was in 2018-19, now it would be about 380 EUR / month for the same room incl. internet.

Now, let’s dive in to the Irish living conditions. In Dublin the housing crisis is being solved by moving more people in one room/apt./house. As a teacher of English as a foreign language I had students who were sharing room with 5-12 other people. The poorer the country the students came from, the more unbearable conditions they were living in. Some sites in Ireland do not even rent out rooms, they rent out beds for as much as 500 EUR / month. One of my students was in a flat where was 22 people…

This means no privacy. It means you live with people you do not know, who could steal things from you, eat your foodstuff and so on. Think about it, how close are these living conditions close to German and Soviet concentration camps?

To pay for it, you need to work as a mule. You are under so much pressure, the stress is nearly impossible to manage, because you have no free time. Although you work as a fuckin’ mule, you have no extra money, because all your hard earned money are consumed by the rent. As you have no extra money, you cannot enjoy life, there is no joy in your life. You live literally like a prisoner in a concentration camp. Your only hope for leaving this vicious cycle, is to move out of Ireland.

In recent years Ireland’s economy has improved from the 3rd world’s economy, but in some ways Ireland is still run like a 3rd world country and not like developed countries on the European continent. On the paper, Ireland is producing something, but in reality Irish are good in wine, women and song. Irish are very easy going and majority of them have very good hearts. But they are literally incapable of producing anything of value. They cannot build cars (and you do not want them to build your car let alone to fix it“). Irish are the most miserable engineers in the world. Their houses are of waaaay lower build quality than those on the continent and they are a bit disorganised. Despite the fact they are disorganised, things work, but they work differently. 

Example: I ordered something form IKEA. Someone in IKEA packed 3 things I ordered in such a large box that it could not be accepted by the delivery station. I got an e-mail a couple of days later that the box was too big and hence could not be delivered, but I can pick it at depot. The depot was on the edge of Dublin, so I asked them if they can kindly deliver the package to my doorstep. To my surprise, they did. 🤷‍♂️

Back to the Irish housing crisis:

Ireland built in the past (up to late 1980’) houses for its people. But during the rule of Margaret Thatcher (the UK has still significant influence on Ireland), people who lived in subsidised housing were considered ’lazy’. The government stopped to build housing and left it the mercy of the market.

Currently, according to the committee on housing, the prices of housing increase on average for about 100 EUR per year. The minimum wage increases as well. In 2024 it was 12,70 EUR per hour, in 2025 it is increasing to 13,50 EUR per hour. But all extra money the workers earn every year are basically consumed by the rents and benefit only the evil landlords, who can then go on extra vacation and live free happy life while people who work hard keep hating their lives and live in permanent state of stress and anxiety.

What I find interesting is that Ireland never had communism. I have never seen kids in Easter Europe to campaign for a communist party on a school campus. But I did in Ireland. We, who have experienced communism, know that it does not and cannot work. Communism only helps to narrow down the differences between the classes (especially the rich and the poor) when the situation is really unbearable. Communist revolution is like a reset button for a society and everybody is equal again on the end of this equation. There is no anomaly as in the equation of capitalism where some people are still more equal than the others (esp. those with money and as Karl Marx calls it: those owning the means of production).

Anyway, as a politician in post communist countries you cannot take from people and give nothing back. As the matter of fact you have to show that you are handing taxes of hardworking men back to the system, so the mayor of the city you live at can build a new metro line, buy new buses, trams, build new bridges, rejuvenate the streets etc. It is expected that the major of the city will set some money aside for himself and his friends, which is common practise in Eastern Europe, but politicians in west are bribed as well, it all looks just far more sophisticated.

Somehow Ireland is not the least corrupt state. Irish excel in all kinds of scams and frauds. But the main difference is that the taxes do not go back to the people of Ireland. Where they go? I do not know. 😃🤷‍♂️

Ireland recently cashed out 13 bn EUR from Apple for the tax evasion, but it was the European court of justice, which ruled the decision and Ireland gladly accepted. The way the Irish played the Americans went something like this:  

🇨🇮 Americans come here, 0% tax on your EU profits. 

🇺🇸Yayyy! 🥳 Cool we love it!

🇨🇮Oh, fuck, the EU now says you have to pay all the shortened taxes back. It is not our mistake, that is the evil EU!

🇺🇸Oh, shit, we guess it is not mistake of our Irish friends. But most of us came from Ireland so we are happy to give them our US money so they can develop their country properly.

Btw. there was a massive public discussion as what to do with these 13 bn EUR. Shall we build a new metro line? Shall we finally provide housing for people who live in Ireland? The government’s response went something like this: Noooooo! Fuck them! They can buy their own houses, haha!!! 😂 Who cares they will pay the rent forever and they will never own a shit in their lives.

Generation rent:

The generation of boomers likes to call millennials and all the consequent generations lazy. But the bastards had it easy in their lives. Houses were affordable. They had plenty of well paid job opportunities. Now these rich bastards have accumulated all the fuckin’ wealth in the society and there is nothing left. But millennials and all the consequent generations are not lazy. They work even harder than boomers, but they cannot afford a shit. No apartment, no house, no fucking kids, no fucking car, no fucking anything! (double negative - for English grammar Nazies) 😎

Irish government does not recognise that shelter is one of the very basic human needs. In communist countries you got shit salary, you could not buy capitalist western goods and shelves in supermarkets were mostly empty. You were paid shit money, but you got a fuckin’ apartment from the state!!! Which means you could live. But when I look on the situation in Ireland you cannot live even like a dog, not alone like a human being.

You see, what the Irish government is actually doing is setting up a pyramid scheme. Those on the top of the pyramid will get their rents off those who do not own a house. But the scheme works. Many landlords are TDs (Teachta Dála) members of the Dáil (Irish Parliament). They are getting paid by their tenants, why would they cut themselves from the profits and increase the protection of tenants and made housing more affordable? 

I will borrow an idea form another book der Kaiser 👑 has read but did not review: Civilized to Death: What Was Lost on the Way to Modernity by Christopher Ryan. Civilized to Death is the ultimate backlash of the human civilisation. It tells the story of how we got fucked by ’being’ civilised and how uncivilised people are happier than we are. For example Ryan says that we used to live in very small tribes until the introduction of agriculture. Before that when somebody in tribe was in need of housing, all man from the village came together and build a house for that person/couple/family. There was no fuckin’ mortgage, no fuckin’ rent, no 9 to 5 slavery in a bullshit job. Men just came together and they build a house. Simple.

Civilized to Death also mentions that hunters and gatherers used to hunt and gather 4 hours per day. The rest of their day was free. How many hours we work today to pay for all the bullshit and especially housing which we even do not own?

I am the ultimate free thinker. I hate slavery. I hate when somebody gives me salary, because I prefer to charge my own rates. Housing market is the modern way of how to enslave people under the capitalist ideology. Capitalism intends to create the same superordination and subordination similar to the master and slave in the times of Roman empire. When you think about that. The rights are all made up (I am saying this as a lawyer, which is a fuckin’ paradox). But imagine what happens when people have had enough and there is a revolution! All the cards are taken from the players, they are put back in the stack, then they are shuffled and handed out again.

What would be the solution?

I have to disappoint those who thought of communist revolution, because communism does not work. The real solution is the rent regulation and the national housing company! Ireland has some rent regulation in place, but it is not enforced. Irish are very lenient in enforcing rules. One one hand, this makes Ireland a really nice country, because you won’t be bothered by the fuckin’ governemnt at all, on the other hand, when the rent regulation is not enforced and all extra profits made by an average worker are consumed by increasing rents, then it is really a problem.

The second idea of the national housing company is not a new concept. The idea would be simply to build enough houses and rent them / sell them to people (not to landlords, US/German vulture funds) for affordable market prices.

Kaiser’s Verdict: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (highly recommended read)

The book is very good. It outlines the causes of the Irish housing crisis and it comes up with possible solutions. I hope that Dr. Rory Hearne gets the chance to influence the Irish politics and eventually improves the tedious housing situation in the country.

If you are interested in Irish Housing Crisis you can watch the documentary called 100 Years of Irish Housing Crisis on TG4, the program is partially in Irish and English, but English subtitles could be switched on for the entire duration of the program:

https://www.tg4.ie/en/player/categories/top-documentaries/play/?pid=6339794512112&title=100%20Bliain%20de%20Thith%C3%ADocht%20-%20G%C3%A9arch%C3%A9im%20Gan%20Deireadh&series=100%20Bliain%20de%20Thith%C3%ADocht%20-%20G%C3%A9arch%C3%A9im%20Gan%20Deireadh&genre=Faisneis&pcode=653141

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⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

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Coming Up Next:

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

Peace 🧘‍♂️✌️🌱