Our Cork 2040:"I'm thinking of building a Shanty town."

In the final instalment of Our Cork 2040, Conor Gilligan writes about his own experience of two and a half years of hidden homelessness.

Welcome to the 14th and final instalment of Our Cork 2040.

So many fantastic guest contributors have written for this series, shedding light on areas of their own personal experience from tree-planting to direct provision, from autism to providing services for domestic abuse survivors.

We owe a massive debt of gratitude to everyone who wrote for it.

Here at Tripe + Drisheen, we are very proud of the resulting series. It’s not a cross-section of Cork, but it probably never could have been.

There are many more perspectives we would like to have included, but one thing I (Ellie) have learned from commissioning Our Cork 2040 is that some of the voices we need to hear the most go unheard because there are significant barriers to access for many, from lack of confidence in literacy skills to lack of time, to lack of trust.

So this series is marked almost as much by the voices that are absent as by the voices that are present.

The idea behind Our Cork 2040 was to highlight that when planning Cork city and county’s future, the perspectives that are all too often included are those of developers, corporates and the “business community.”

The seed for Our Cork 2040 was planted by the response to A City Rising….Towards What? which we published in March, following Micheál Martin’s announcement of the €353 million docklands regeneration project. Given the precedents being set with the Port of Cork buildings, the former Sextant site and the so-called Prism building amongst others, we think the docklands development comes with the substantial risk of being a project centred around money and corporate space instead of around the needs of Cork people.

We wanted to use the Our Cork 2040 series to highlight that it’s people who live, work, raise families and face all of life’s challenges in Cork who really hold a stake in the future of the city and county. 

If you want to make sure your voice gets heard in the plans for Cork city’s future, the deadline for submissions to Cork City Council’s Cork City Development Plan 2022-2028 is this Monday, the 4th of October.

Our Cork 2040 is an opinion-based series. Tripe+Drisheen doesn’t necessarily share these opinions, but we do feel they should be heard. If you like what you read and want to support quality, independent local journalism, subscribe below.

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Our Cork 2040: Conor Gilligan

Conor Gilligan is a musician with a background in software engineering. He is originally from Co Waterford, and he has lived in a variety of places including Alaska and China. He moved to Cork ten years ago.

Living with constant uncertainty

I am one of the so-called hidden homeless. I live on couches, in spare beds and by the charity of my friends. Of the last three years two and a half of them have been spent not having a place that I can call home.

Life like this is very difficult for me; I’m not always the most stable type of person at the best of times and living with constant uncertainty and insecurity, I’ve found myself becoming increasingly prone to long debilitating periods of worry and despair.

Friends will often tell me to keep my head up or that something will come along and they mean well, but I just can’t see it. I don’t see any light at the end of the tunnel, instead I feel as though I have been caught in the gravity well of a black hole with insufficient relative velocity to make orbit. 

How did it come to this, you might ask. What sequence of events could result in such a nightmare scenario? A very long sequence of painful events in my personal life left me a shadow of my former self, and I was barely but a shadow of a well-adjusted person to begin with. At the time I was living in a lovely place with some friends. Indeed, I had just started to come back to a place where I could envision a future for myself.

Then we got a nice letter informing us we were being evicted and would all have to find new homes. I had a tough time finding a place, and so stayed with friends for several months.

It was the bank’s house. And now it’s empty.

Eventually I did find a new home, another lovely place, but the house was in some state of repossession and like a big old fucking clock of old came another letter. Get the fuck out again. We complied. Our eviction date was Christmas Eve. Somebody somewhere in an office saw no problem with that, and why should they? It was, after all, the bank's house. To this day I think the house sits empty. We should have just stayed. After this I really struggled to find anywhere.

Over the past few years I have sent hundreds of messages to ads on daft.ie trying to find a room in a houseshare. In that time I’ve only had the opportunity to come and view a handful of places. Part of this can be explained by the fact that I have a dog.

So many places will be unavailable to me due to the prejudice that exists in Irish landlords against dogs, but also I know both from personal experience and from what others have told me, as soon as you advertise a room, your inbox will be annihilated with messages.

I tend to live life in a constant low level panic attack, but when faced with meeting a group of strangers who are meeting me for the exact purpose of scrutinising me, it escalates dramatically. Whereas I would normally be able to act naturally, In a house-viewing situation I will be sweating, possibly shaking and subconsciously formulating an expedient exit strategy before I ever ring the doorbell. 

Renting a place by myself is not even an option anymore. Shortly after I moved to Cork, around a decade ago, I shared a smallish but nice, warm and comfortable house with my then girlfriend: three bedrooms and a small back garden for €650 euro a month.

Utterly Daft

Today, similar rentals are advertised for three times that figure or more. As I write this there are a total of 50 properties advertised on Daft.ie for rent in Cork, a city with a population approaching 200,000 residents. 

I'm approved for the HAP (Housing Assistance Payment) scheme, in theory, but it doesn’t even come close to meeting the kind of capital investment you need these days just to exist. Saying HAP to a landlord is the number one way to ensure a property is occupied.

Because of the massive lack of livable spaces, landlords (And by landlords I mean rental agencies) will always find that they have a better fit for a tenant. It’s a sellers market after all, so “sorry the property has been let to another client” becomes a sort of mantra. Yet you can still see it sitting on Daft like a big fat fucking peach, available to rent after you were told it was gone.

Even if I could afford the exorbitant rents that are being charged for tiny number of places, the fact of the matter is: I have a dog!?!

While black mould, leaking pipes and rotting window frames are not seemingly a cause for concern to rental agencies and landlords these days, the presence of a canine is of the utmost concern and should be avoided at all costs lest they chew through the foundations and cause that old council house that was inherited from the parents to list and sink back into the silt on which this city was built.

Creeping despair and disillusionment

The housing crisis, for me at least, is a time of creeping despair and disillusionment. Without a place to live I cannot really commit to anything or plan for the future. I’m trapped inside a loop of panic, frustration and self-doubt. There have been many opportunities that friends will make me aware of, or that I myself will conceive of and entertain for a fleeting moment of optimism only to realise the impossibility of the logistics required and a moment later recoil in despondent hopelessness again.

I’ve all but lost faith in the current political establishment to address the issue of housing. I don’t subscribe to the “sure they’re all a thieving shower of cunts” mentality, but I don’t believe that those currently in power either desire or have the expertise to mitigate this crisis or the wider complex of crises that are increasingly apparent in our society, be that energy, healthcare, housing or the big fat ecological crisis of climate change.

Nobody could have foreseen this coming…for the past decade

There seems to be no forecasting involved at decision making level for any of these pressing issues. Indeed there seems to be very little interest in even perceiving problems that currently exist. Great effort seems to go instead into painting over the mould, bulldozing the tents and proclaiming, with raised hands, nobody could have seen this coming. 

Nobody could have foreseen this coming for at least a decade. 

Yet had anybody the foresight to implement policies to manage what nobody has long foreseen then nobody would have seen anything, and this crisis would not have been.

X won’t be the solution to the Y problem. Y problem will not be solved overnight. Let those excuses burn into your eyes. You’ll be seeing it in your future nightmares.

Would it be possible to implement a housing strategy that could incorporate a prediction of future housing requirements and plan to meet those needs? If the requirements change, could said plan be structured in such a way as to scale towards meeting the needs of an entire population over time? Is predictive modelling possible at all?

A National Housing Authority. Or a Shanty Town?

Spoiler: predictive modelling is possible. But…..

This kind of planning is not evident in the behavior of our leaders; planning does not seem to happen. It doesn’t even seem expected that it should happen or even acknowledged that it could happen. There is no long term plan. There is no willingness to make one. There’s not even the willingness to admit that we might need to make one.

In my most idealistic of thoughts I imagine a situation where we have some national agency, we can call it the NHA, or National Housing Authority, for those not in the know.

The remit of said authority would be to predict and ensure that housing demand is met by supply, and to maybe manage the state-constructed homes that are used to provide a buffer against this insane view of homes as an investment opportunity.

I don’t know for sure if it’s even possible to establish such an organisation without the allocated funding dissipating in a haze of brown paper envelopes. But, do we want to be living in a country with tent cities? Do we want to be living in a nation with shanty towns? 

The social contract is fracturing in this country, if it’s not already broken; there are ever increasing numbers of people finding that they cannot afford to live. Even those that can are finding themselves squeezed by the funnel of free market forces into accepting the black mould and rotting windows of the current housing market.

So I’m thinking of building a shanty town. At least you could have a home there. Corrugated iron and rotten wood beams. 

Sounds like heaven to me.

Why Cork has so many vacant homes and derelict sites