‘Nothin’ But a Wee Humble Cottage’: At Home in Irish Cinema

Abstract

In September 2011, an Irish Times article on the unfinished ‘ghost estates’ that were blighting the post-Celtic Tiger Irish landscape cited the statistic that over the previous four years, Ireland had experienced the worst crash in house prices in the world since the Second World War (Holland, 2011). This fact, alongside the 2,881 incomplete housing estates that the Department of Environment calculated to be in existence around the country at the time, rendered in strikingly concrete terms the loss of economic sovereignty that had been experienced both individually and collectively since Ireland’s economic boom had come to a dramatic end three years previously. The dominant role that the construction industry had played within the Irish economy over the previous ten years, constituting as much as 21% of national income by 2006/2007 (Kelly, 2009), as well as the personal spending power that inflated house prices had granted to large sections of the Irish population, ensured that the subsequent mass devaluation of domestic property now functioned as a powerful index of economic decline. In the aftermath of the crash, the home became increasingly associated with burden within popular and media discourse as large numbers of people struggled to cope with unaffordable mortgages on houses now worth significantly less than the amount that had been paid for them.