I don’t live in Ireland at the moment but Bank of Ireland got into a bit of trouble over the last day or two over some advertising campaign whereby they had Orla moving in with her parents so she and the other half could save money for a deposit. There was war and rumours of war. The ad got pulled.

There seems to be broadly two trains of thought: a) this should not be normalised and b) this is normal and what’s the problem.

I’m of the (a) school of thought. For the most part, if I were ever to move in with my parents, I’d expect to be paying rent and upkeep. Fair is fair. I’m an adult. The model in the ad looked like she was in her 30s. I haven’t lived with my parents since I was 17. I think if I’d had to move in at the age of 32 it would have been extremely culturally difficult for all of us. And it certainly would not have been free gratis either.

The property market in Dublin is utterly crazy at the moment. There are a lot of reasons for this: the numbers of units which have moved from the residental market to the commercial short term let market via AirBnB is one contributor, the lack of building over the last 10 years won’t have helped either. The fact that there have been very high profile failures of regulation for property built in the time period 2000 – 2007 also won’t be helping.

But.

Normalising adults still living with their parents is socially a very bad idea. Doing it for money even more so. Parents should be able to expect their off spring to fend for themselves by the time they hit 21. Neither the offspring nor the parents should be having their style cramped by living with their parents.

This is the problem I have with the ad – that it normalises something which is probably not a great thing from a social point of view. That being said, it’s one of only a myriad of problems that are not great from a social point of view. The accommodation problems in Dublin have wider ramifications in terms of quality of life, people commuting from further distances, impacts on spatial planning, people will wind up trapped in negative equity again, and there will be problems again. I got out of Dublin because I could afford to neither rent nor buy and this is the reality for a lot of people working in the Dublin area. That’s not sustainable and a few people moving in with their parents to try and stash the guts of more than a year’s gross salary in savings isn’t going to fix that.

The simple problem is this: for property to become affordable, property values are going to have to halve again. And there are a lot of people yowling about the current snowflakes have it too easy and are entitled who are doing that yowling because they own the property and they don’t want to sell it for an affordable price.