Ireland seems to be leading the way to the WEF's broad sunlit uplands.*
From The Irish Times, July 12:
Rent used to be a bad word in Ireland, so bad that it was usually pronounced as the more savage-sounding “rint”. As in an old anti-landlord ballad: “Like Egypt’s king he’ll not relint/ The gintleman that takes the rint.”
Bad memories of this gintleman shaped Irish attitudes to property. Being a tenant was associated, not just with personal insecurity, but with national humiliation.
The drive to get out from under the sway of that gintleman was one of the great forces that shaped Ireland in the 20th century. The end of tenancy was, at the level of ordinary families, the equivalent of the achievement of statehood — both were declarations of independence.
What’s remarkable about this movement, though, is that it did not stop with its original goal of allowing small farmers to become owners of the land they worked. Much more quietly and less dramatically, it became an urban phenomenon too.
After the second World War the private landlord began to disappear from Irish towns and cities. In 1946, 26 per cent of Irish households were renting their homes from a private owner. By 1991 that figure was down to just 8 per cent.
The gintleman that takes the rint was a dying breed. Most people who paid rent for their homes did so to their local authority, benefiting from regulation and security. More and more people, meanwhile, were taking out mortgages to buy their own homes.....
"...all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science...."
-Before the House of Commons
