HAVE YOU EVER experienced the thrill of queuing for something overnight? Perhaps for Star Wars in the 1980s, or a concert where you just had to be pressed up against the front row railing, or that unfortunate episode a few years ago when we shut down the 24-hour Krispy Kreme in Blanchardstown?

Once upon a time, queueing overnight for anything was the sign of a diehard fan, a rite of bonding that brought you closer together with all the other weirdos and obsessives of the thing you like. Things are a little different in modern-day Ireland, however, where camping out overnight has become part of the Herculean task that is buying a house.

This week over a dozen prospective first-time buyers slept in their cars outside an estate in Kildare where house viewings were scheduled to take place. It’s a reminder that even those who are lucky enough to be able to stump up tens of thousands of euro for a deposit and have combined six-figure salaries face shocking indignity to buy a house that’s nearly an hour drive from the nearest city.

This is the way of it now. Anyone who has ever attended a competitive house-viewing (which is a tautology in modern Ireland) has had that feeling of being willing to do anything at all to reach a milestone that was once taken for granted by so many. 

But things are getting better! Forty thousand new homes were delivered by the state last year, as we were repeatedly told in the run-up to the general election, so at least we’re on the right track. Sorry, I’m just getting word in my ear from my producer… Oh, not true? Missed that target by nearly 10,000 homes? Public misled? You don’t say. Ah well, no harm done. It was only an election.

At least the government has now acknowledged that they – how do I put this journalistically? – failed to make the correct figures available. Former Minister for Housing Darragh O’Brien has been singled out as the culprit on this one, and Simon Harris has said the inaccurate figure should never have been provided to the government, though Harris defended the mistake as made “in good faith”.

“We know we need a hell of a lot more homes,” Simon Harris said on Friday when asked about this ‘failure to be accurate’, performing that trick he does where he tries to sound emphatic and energetic (“You ain’t seen nothing yet”) in order to distract from a government performance that is anything but. Are your knuckles going white yet? Mine certainly are, and it’s really getting in the way of my typing. 

Ghost buses

If you can contain your rage long enough, the funniest part of this story is that O’Brien is now Minister for Transport and has been out and about this week acknowledging yet another infrastructural failure in the form of ‘ghost buses’ — a paranormal phenomenon native to Ireland whereby phantoms and chimeras play tricks on unassuming commuters who foolishly believe the real-time information provided to them by Transport For Ireland only for buses to never show up. Forget sleeping in your car to get a house, there are some bus-stops where you’d have to pitch a tent all morning to be sure of one finally trundling into sight and taking you to work or school or a doctor’s appointment or some other unimportant thing that you stupidly thought you’d be on time for.

There are very few commuters in Dublin who are not intimately familiar with this years-long problem which has gone unaddressed despite plan after strategy after solution being devised and implemented and all sorts of new bodies and agencies and organisations added to the mix, all in the name of finally bestowing upon Dublin a functional public transport system. Trusting a bus schedule in Dublin is the behaviour of a lunatic, and those of us who use buses regularly know that a Plan B is always necessary. 

It would almost be enough to drive even the most fervent supporter of public transport to buying a car. Though at least a car would serve a dual-purpose. No more ghost buses, and somewhere to sleep while you wait your turn fight it out for a house. 

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But it’s not just the public getting ghosted, whether by house or by bus. The same fate appeared to befall our own leaders this week.

The Regionals

It has been was reported that Taoiseach Micheál Martin and Tánaiste Simon Harris were ‘very annoyed’ about submissions made by the Regional Independent Whatever Group sent to the Ceann Comhairle which indicated that they would vote with the government on a case-by-case basis.

It would be nice to keep this brief but it’s worth laying the the facts out clearly. Throughout this dispute – which was covered in this column last week – the coalition leaders maintained it was legitimate for these four TDs to have the right to opposition speaking time on the basis that they are not, in the most pedantic sense possible, ‘part’ of the government. Then, when they found out that the same four TDs who were lobbying tooth and nail for opposition speaking time might occasionally behave as though they were not part of the government in an actual, tangible way, the government got very upset about it.

They tried to have their cake and eat it too, and not only has that plan blown up in their faces, but it also turns out that the cake may have an agenda of its own. 

Given the utter, and I mean utter, shamelessness of the above, now seems the most appropriate time to remember that when the real opposition (a phrase I can’t believe has become necessary) tried to object to this state of affairs, Micheál Martin described it as, and you’re going to want to sit down for this, a ‘subversion of the Constitution’. Sort of like when you take your child’s Playstation away because they won’t do their homework and they accuse you of violating their human rights.

It could not be funnier, therefore, that the coalition leaders are very upset about this. We should be delighted that this upsets them. This is an outcome they so richly deserve.