Surrealing in the Years: 'How To Suffer Indignity' - a documentary by the Department of Housing

LAST WEEKEND, THE Irish government entered into evidence Exhibit #309273347r824 of Just Not Getting It when it comes to the housing crisis.

When the Department of Housing social media accounts shared a short video made by youth health and wellbeing charity Spunout, which offered some brief advice on how to adjust to moving back into one’s family home, it once again suggested an uncomfortable ignorance of what people expect from the government in addressing the housing crisis. 

The video features advice like ‘If you’re feeling down about your situation, talking about it with someone you trust can be very helpful’ and reminds the viewer to do their share of the chores, which is the kind of thing that anyone might accept from a friend or a peer, but less so from a housing department that has overseen the kind of explosion in rental and house prices that has left so many back home on the couch of the family living room, watching Heartbeat reruns with our parents for the 300th time and thinking, ‘Maybe I’ll just stay here until I die’. 

It’s the kind of pushing-a-boulder-up-a-hill advice you might expect from an NGO that’s probably at the end of its tether in the face of a rental crisis that has been crushing young people across Ireland for nearly a decade. It’s one thing to be told not to despair by a peer in the same boat; it’s quite another to hear it from the white whale that’s been gnawing on the hull. 

The utter shamelessness necessary to have shared the video reaffirms what we already knew about how the Irish government sees its responsibility when it comes to the broken housing market. Outsource as much of it as possible while behaving like something between a credit union and a student’s union. A couple of schemes, a couple of reposted low-budget videos, all ultimately boiling down to: ‘If your parents can’t help you then you, my friend, are absolutely cooked.’

Over the years of my relatively young life, I’ve moved back in with my parents no less than six times, so I can speak with some authority on the matter. I would say the very first step of the process is not so much making a plan about who does what chores and when, the first step is more akin to swallowing your pride while you sit in the same room that once had a Barney poster on the wall and glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to the ceiling and realising that the freedom, the independence, the opportunities for personal growth that should be the right of every adult have been at least temporarily constrained in your case. 

It’s sort of like if the Department of Health shared a video explaining how to remove your own appendix with a pair of scissors. Sure, whoever made it has good intentions, and yeah, it could come in handy someday, but it’s not exactly ideal if we’ve gotten to that point, and the fact that a state organ would feel the need to share a video about it does not fill the public with confidence as to their plans to address the matter. 

What the video succeeded in illustrating is the mundanity of the housing crisis in so many cases. Yes, of course it could be worse. Yes, there’s an element of good fortune in even having a family home to move back into. No, those who live reluctantly with their parents are not the chief victims of Ireland’s many social failures. 

However, the feelings of disappointment, embarrassment, failure, frustration, constriction and in some cases hopelessness that come with accepting that you’re functionally barely further along than you were when you were five years old do take a very real toll on people. It’s harder to date. It’s harder to fall in love. Harder to think about having children. It’s harder to come to your own conclusions about what you earnestly want from life. It’s harder to realise who you are. It’s impossible to feel as though you are meeting your potential. No, it’s not as acutely distressing as being left too long on a waiting list for surgery, or sleeping rough on the streets, but it is, in many cases, its own humiliation. 

If the Department of Housing really took any of this seriously, at the very least they’d make their own series of videos. What to do when you’ve spent a decade sharing flats with a revolving cast of randos just so you can start to smell the property ladder. What to do when all of your appliances keep breaking one after the other but you don’t want to raise it with your landlord in case they decide they don’t need the hassle and turf you out. Hell, how about a whole series? How To Suffer Indignity — a documentary by the Department of Housing. Directed by Ken Loach.

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If they really wanted a video that carried some weight, they could have put a bit of a budget behind it, maybe hired a big name to narrate. To be fair to them, however, Liam Neeson was busy. 

Neeson is under fire this week for lending his voice to the narration of a health conspiracy documentary based on a book co-authored by Kent Heckenlively, a collaborator of famed wackjob Alex Jones, the man best known for spreading the lie that the 2012 Sandy Hook primary school shooting was a hoax and directing his supporters to harass the families of the children who had been gunned down. 

As well as Neeson’s narration, the documentary features high-profile contributions from the likes of Donald Trump’s health secretary RFK Jr, a man who is currently dismantling the American public healthcare system because he holds the medical beliefs of a fishwife in a 14th century Dutch village. 

The documentary is called Plague of Corruption, and its trailer features the argument, among others, that former US Chief Medical Advisor Dr Anthony Fauci should be imprisoned for encouraging the US to adopt lockdown measures that were not even as stringent as the ones introduced in Ireland.

Now, in my long and storied history as Ireland’s premier digital-only columnist, I can tell you that the most abuse I’ve ever received for an article was the time I wrote about Neeson’s 2017 appearance on The Late Late Show, during which he downplayed the Me Too movement, characterised it as “a bit of a witch hunt,” and dismissed accusations of an actor groping an intern as “childhood stuff”.

Obviously, I don’t want to go up against Aslan, against Qui Gon Jin, against Oskar Schindler, for crying out loud. There’s no pleasure to be extracted from pointing out that one of your most legendary, most beloved countrymen is behaving like an utter fool. But unfortunately, much like the man himself, I too have a particular set of skills, and it’s to slag people off for doing stupid shit like this. 

A statement issued to the Guardian by representatives for the Ballymena man says Neeson ‘never has been, and is not, anti-vaccination,’ pointing to his work as a Unicef goodwill ambassador who just four years ago praised the Irish public for donating two million Covid vaccinations to healthcare workers and vulnerable people in developing countries.

‘He did not shape the film’s editorial content, and any questions about its claims or messaging should be directed to the producers,’ it says, as though that is some sort of absolution. 

It’s hard to know what would be worse. To side with the likes of RFK Jr because you’ve really been taken in by his ghoulish proclamations, or to disagree with what he says but go along with it anyway because somebody has added a few coppers to what is undoubtedly already a ridiculous pile of wealth. I mean, we’re talkin’ Rob Roy money, here. 

It’s an especially poorly timed release for Neeson, since Ireland is currently staring down the barrel of a 49% week-on-week increase in the flu to such an extent that several hospitals have had to introduce restrictions on visiting hours. Concerningly, it has been recorded that over three-quarters of those currently hospitalised have not been vaccinated. 

Of course, maybe those vaccination figures would be higher if the flu jab were cheaper and more widely accessible, but who knows? Maybe all we need is for the Department of Health to share a helpful 90-second video about how to take shallow breaths. 

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