Earlier this week the Department of Housing posted a video to its social media accounts that seems likely to be remembered, decades from now, as a particularly lurid example of the current Government’s failure to deal with an ongoing housing disaster.
The video – produced as part of a campaign with the youth information and support NGO SpunOut – features two young people offering advice to those who have had to move back in with their parents.
“Sharing a home with family members as an adult is very different to doing so as a child,” we are told. “During your time apart, you’ve probably all grown as people, and developed different needs and expectations.” There follows advice about setting up ground rules, paying rent, taking on household chores, taking care of your mental health, and so on.
In itself, the advice given in the video is fairly uncontroversial, and even, in a narrow sense, helpful. (Unsurprisingly, however, given its 80 second-odd running time, none of it is particularly detailed). The two presenters do a perfectly good job, and are motivated by a straightforward interest in helping their fellow young people – and, increasingly, not-so-young people – navigate a profoundly difficult situation.
The problem with the video is not the video itself, in other words, but rather the fact that the Department of Housing thought it would be a good idea to make social media posts offering advice to people forced to move back home. The whole thing is something of an object lesson in context and perspective. If viewed simply as an information campaign, by and for young people, on how to look after themselves and their families in a challenging set of circumstances, it’s fine. But viewed as an attempt by the Government to advise people on how to negotiate a crisis for which the Government itself is largely, if not solely, responsible, then it looks profoundly patronising – and, worse still, clueless. What it would seem to suggest is that the Government genuinely does not understand the extent of the anger caused by its own failures.
You will presumably not be surprised to learn that the video received instant and widespread opprobrium. The people in the Department of Housing, on the other hand, presumably were surprised, given that they went out of their way to back the campaign.
Opposition representatives were swift and merciless. Rory Hearne, the Social Democrats housing spokesperson, described the video as “incredibly insensitive and tone deaf”, as well as “cringe and embarrassing”. His Labour counterpart, Conor Sheehan called it “incredibly distasteful” and “the most patronising thing I’ve ever seen”, as well as a “very blatant admission of failure” by the Government in its dealings with the housing crisis. Sinn Féin’s housing spokesperson Eoin Ó Broin asked, in a social media post, whether James Browne, the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, really believed “that this Dept should be ‘advising’ adults about how to cope with moving back in with their parents?”
There was a certain gleefulness to these responses, but you could hardly blame the Opposition parties for taking advantage of such an absolute sitter. Politics is nothing, after all, if not an opportunistic business, and this was an unparalleled opportunity to frame the Government as out of touch and tone deaf.
The Department of Housing quickly took the video down from social media. This was, to be fair, clearly the correct decision, because the young people featured in the video could hardly be held accountable for the campaign’s misguidedness, and, social media being what it is, were likely to receive unfair abuse for their role in it. (The department subsequently clarified, indeed, that the video was taken down at the presenters’ request.)
Watching the video on the department’s X account, during the relatively short window before it was taken down, I experienced a mild sense of temporal dislocation, as though I were watching it several decades from now on some future series of Reeling in the Years. The most common response to the clip was to liken it to satire, but actually it felt more like ready-made archival footage, a potent illustration of how badly the mid-2020s Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael Government fumbled not just the housing crisis but also the communications crisis surrounding it.
In a way, it’s the latter that feels like the more spectacular fumble. I don’t mean to imply that the housing crisis should not be blamed on the Government – the two parties of which, I need hardly say, have literally never been out of power in the history of this State – because it absolutely should. But it’s a crisis with many complex causes and exacerbating factors, and which people generally believe will take a long time to solve, even with a Government committed to doing so. What should not be difficult and complicated, however, is avoiding demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of why the public are angry about the housing crisis, and what is likely to make them even angrier. What should not be difficult and complicated is not adding insult to injury. A government that doesn’t understand something as simple as this would not appear to be capable of solving something as difficult and complex as the larger crisis.
In an interview on Morning Ireland, Ó Broin put it even more forcefully than he did in his social media post: “When you see that video on the Department of Housing’s website,” he said, “it’s almost like the person who sets fire to your house then hands you a bucket of water to put out that fire.”
Not to nitpick, but it strikes me as less like being handed a bucket of water to put out your burning house than being handed an information leaflet on how best to accommodate yourself to living in a burning house.
I am reminded here of the indelible scene in Charlie Kaufman’s film Synecdoche, New York, in which a chipper estate agent shows Samantha Morton around a property which, because it happens to be on fire, is priced to sell. Morton admits that, although she likes the house, she’s concerned about dying in the fire.
“It’s a big decision,” the estate agent replies, “how one prefers to die.”
The Department of Housing could hardly have spun it better themselves.
