Domestic Documents: Contemporary Photography and the Irish Housing Crisis

By all accounts, Ireland currently faces an acute housing crisis not seen since the 1960s. While the country has historically struggled with housing inadequacy and eviction, this most recent crisis, unlike those facilitated by colonial dispossession, is a self-inflicted wound – the result of short-sighted economic decision-making and the failures of a free-market approach. Yet, what many analyses have failed to appreciate is the culture animating housing in both its material and symbolic dimensions. Using contemporary Irish photography as a source of inquiry into the cultural origins of the crisis, this article considers how imaginative constructions of home by Martin Parr, Paul Seawright, Anthony Haughey, Aideen Barry and others have troubled domesticity in post-war Ireland. Bringing ‘domestic documents’ of the present into dialogue with those produced before the 2008 financial crash, the article argues that such images reveal a critical gap between the post-colonial conception of home and the complex reality of its lived experience in modern Ireland, suggesting that housing crisis may follow, at least partly, from a failure to reconcile the present with the past.