Boomerang_ Travels in the New Third World - Michael D. Lewis [50]
The wet hedgerows cultivated along the highway to hide the wet road from the wet houses now hide the wet houses from the wet road. PICTURE OF THE VILLAGE OF THE FUTURE, reads a dripping billboard with a picture of a village that will never be built. Randomly selecting a village that appears to be more or less finished, we pull off the road. It’s an exurb, without a suburb. GLEANN RIADA, reads the self-important sign in front. It’s a few dozen houses in a field, attached to nothing but each other, ending with unoccupied slabs of concrete buried in weeds. You can see the moment the money stopped flowing from the Irish banks, the developer folded his tent, and the Polish workers went home. “The guys who laid this didn’t even believe it was supposed to be finished,” says Ian. The concrete slab, like the completed houses, is riven by the cracks that you see in a house after a major earthquake but which in this case are caused by carelessness. Inside, the floors are littered with trash and debris, the fixtures have been ripped out of the kitchen, and mold spreads spiderlike across the walls. The last time I saw an interior like this was in New Orleans after Katrina.
Ireland’s Department of the Environment published its first audit of the country’s new housing stock in 2009, after inspecting 2,846 housing developments, many of them ghost estates. The government granted planning permission for 180,000 units, of which more than 100,000 are unoccupied. Some of those that are occupied remain unfinished. Virtually all construction has now ceased. There aren’t enough people in Ireland to fill the new houses; there were never enough people in Ireland to fill the new houses. Ask Irish property developers who they imagined was going to live in the Irish countryside and they all laugh the same uneasy laugh and offer up the same list of prospects: Poles; foreigners looking for second homes; entire departments of Irish government workers, who would be shipped to the sticks in a massive, planned relocation plan that somehow never materialized; the diaspora of seventy million human beings with some genetic link to Ireland. The problem that no one paid all that much attention to during the boom was that people from outside Ireland, even those with a genetic link to the place, have no interest in owning houses in Ireland. “This isn’t an international property market,” says an agent at Savills’s Dublin branch named Ronan O’Driscoll. “There aren’t any foreign buyers. There were never foreign buyers.” Dublin was never London. The Irish countryside will never be the Cotswolds.
WHICH WAY ENTIRE nations jumped when the money was made freely available to them obviously told you a lot about them: their desires, their constraints, their secret sense of themselves. How they reacted when the money was taken away was equally revealing. In Greece the money was borrowed by the state: the debts are the debts of the Greek people, but the people want no part of them. The Greeks already have taken to the streets, violently, and have been quick to find people outside of Greece to blame for their problems: monks, Turks, foreign bankers. Greek anarchists now mail bombs to German politicians and hurl Molotov cocktails at their own police. In Ireland the money was borrowed by a few banks, and yet the people seem not only willing to repay it but to do so without so much as a small moan. Back in the autumn of 2008, after the government threatened to means-test the medical care, the old people had marched in the streets of Dublin. A few days after I’d arrived, the students followed suit, but their