From top: Economist Dan O’Brien believes house prices and rents are declining; Anthony Sheridan

You’re talking absolute bullshit, journalist Larissa Nolan told economist Dan O’Brien on RTÉ’s Brendan O’Connor Show.

The issue was housing and O’Brien was telling the nation that house prices and rents were declining and that people should stop catastrophising everything.

It’s astonishing that O’Brien, the chief economist with the Institute of International & European Affairs, is so ignorant of the extent and causes of the housing crisis.

Ms. Nolan also admitted that she didn’t fully understand the underlying reasons but during the discussion she uttered two words that come into common use when a political system becomes hopelessly corrupt – treason and revolution.

Why treason, O’Connor asked in surprise?

Her reply [paraphrased]:

“Because the government has betrayed the people by ignoring their needs in favour of facilitating profit for private landlords.”

She’s not the only person to hold this opinion. Here’s Dr. Rory Hearne, Assistant Professor of Social Policy at Maynooth University:

‘Rising rents is Government policy, and has been since 2011, in order to attract the vulture and real estate investor funds and raise property values to benefit banks.’

Ms. Nolan outlined her personal position in stark terms:

“I’m in the professions, I work 52 weeks of the year and I am nowhere near to being able to buy a one bedroom apartment for me and my son, and that is wrong. There will be a revolution on this soon if it isn’t fixed.”

O’Brien, in a further demonstration of his ignorance, asked Ms. Nolan:

“Why would any government who wants to win votes have a policy to make housing more expensive?”

Nolan admitted she didn’t know but then, unwittingly, provided the answer:

“They wanted the rents to go higher and it is now out of control and everybody’s being affected. It didn’t matter so much when it was a certain class being affected, that’s not my view but I notice that socially…and now that it’s moving up the ladder, it’s affecting middle class people with good wages.”

As Ms. Nolan says, things have got out of control. The disease of corruption has debased the political system to such an extent that there is now only one policy – ensure that house prices and rents continue to soar in order to feed the greed of the rich few. That policy, long inflicted on the poor, is now beginning to destroy the wealth of the middle class.

All corrupt regimes exploit and abuse the powerless poor at the bottom of the pile principally by denying basic rights and inflicting oppressive taxes.

European aristocracies engaged in this despotism for centuries until an emerging merchant/middle class found it necessary to begin cutting off heads in order to gain power and respect.

Ms. Nolan describes herself as being ‘in the professions’. In other words, she [accurately] sees herself as middle class. And it is the middle class that invariably leads the people in destroying corrupt political regimes.

When the middle class begin to [correctly] describe government as treasonous and suggest revolution as a possibility then a bout of head rolling cannot be far away.

Anthony Sheridan is a freelance journalist and blogs at  Public Enquiry.

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