We are no longer a property-owning democracy. The politics of peasant proprietorship, prevalent since the Land Acts at the end of the 19th century, is over. Most of us peasants are still proprietors, but the model is so unhinged it is no longer capable of stabilising our politics.
Listening to Brian Hayes, chief executive of Banking & Payments Federation Ireland, detailing statistics last week about how the young are excluded from the property market, I thought of the Duke of Wellington. Extending the voting franchise in the Great Reform Act of 1832 would, he declared, “destroy the country . . . and all its institutions”.
The scale of exclusion from a political model that has been in place since before the foundation of the state,
