THE ESSAY
In the homeless crisis where 10,000 people are in emergency accommodation, where the fuck am I supposed to have sex? artist Eimear Walshe asks. By Emma Dwyer.
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Earlier this year as I drove home from Dunmore East – where almost all of my mother’s family own second homes – to my thirteenth rented home since leaving my parents’ house in 2008, I passed a fluorescent sign on the side of the National Sculpture Factory. The Land for the People it said. I couldn’t agree more, I said.
The sign was made by Irish artist Eimear Walshe and was accompanied by a pamphlet called ‘The Land for the People’: The Sexual Case for Land Reform in Ireland. The pamphlet is based on research developed during the making of a previous video work: ‘The Land Question: Where the fuck am I supposed to have sex?’ available to watch online HERE. Both works look at the housing crisis through a sexual lens, Eimear also draws parallels between what is happening today and what happened during the land reform of previous centuries.
Before becoming a republic, Ireland experienced land reform during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The Irish Land Commission was initially created in 1881 as a rent fixing commission to overcome poverty problems. It developed into a tenant-purchase agency to assist tenants to purchase land to dismantle the landlord system.
However, land was divided up so much that farming it was economically unviable. After British rule ended, the Commission was reconstituted in the Irish Free State. Under new rule the commission could compulsorily purchase land owned by non-Irish citizens which resulted in the intentional destruction of landlords’ residences – or Big Stately Houses – with Government approval.
“In the 1870s they were campaigning for fixity of tenure, fair rent and freedom of sale. Sorry they were campaigning for that in the 1870s what the fuck went on in the meantime so?” asks Eimear. The Land Commission was eventually dismantled in 1999 which means for a century the Land Commission was the body responsible for redistributing land in Ireland.
While it wasn’t without its problems, it was successful in reversing the ratio of tenants to landlords on farm lands. Eimear asks in their work, why they had never heard about this before, they add, “The entire archive of the land commission is completely off limits, in storage somewhere in Portlaoise.”
So what is the sexual case for land reform? In the introduction to the pamphlet, Eimear has written: “There follows in this workbook some exercises concerning the interlinked nature of land use and sexuality. This land-sex relation, while sometimes minor and other times totally deterministic, is in my view largely overlooked, underestimated, or naturalised.” The exercise book outlines scenarios based on historical realities and imagined futures.
Such as the imagined Thomas Reid Day to commemorate a farmer in Maynooth who fought compulsory purchase of his land. Or the youngest daughter in a family of twelve who can’t marry her love because her family farm is larger than his, the exercise is to select a series of options including 1. Wait for your parents and eleven brothers to die, inherit the house at eighty years old and marry your love.
‘The Land Question: Where the fuck am I supposed to have sex?’ is an artist talk in video format. It opens by saying, “so many times I have been asked the question what three conditions would need to be met in order for me to feel comfortable having sex exclusively outdoors? And I always say the same thing, number 1 decriminalisation, number 2. Good Faith, and number 3 Viable logistics.” Aside from the legal and logistical obstacles to outdoor sex, it explains how sex with someone who owns their own property results in an uneven exchange.
The sexual case for land reform is that each individual should have safe, legal access to consensual sex. “Say for example you were about to divide all of the land on Ireland equally between all of the people who live on the island of Ireland that would amount to about 1 hectare each, or 2 and a half acres….I’m not saying this should be done, I’m just saying this would offer an immediate solution to the question where am I supposed to have sex?” Eimear asks.
Eimear describes the government’s attempts to house all its citizens, and of course provide them with somewhere to legally have sex: “Choosing not to build social housing when we had money. Selling lands zoned for social housing onto private developers. A policy of over reliance on HAP. Paying Gardai to oversee illegal evictions. And achieving 10,000 people in emergency accommodation. And then ingeniously putting it back on me and you.” They say in admiration,” the pedalling of this narrative on collective culpability after 2008 was so clever.”
In the exercises and the video, the scenario of a landlord’s assertion of one’s right over a bride on her wedding night is described. Eimear touches on the legacy of Lord Leitrim of Donegal who allegedly violated girls and young women on his estates in lieu of rent. In 1878 he was murdered by three men – this was widely celebrated and even commemorated as the end of the tyranny of landlordism. Yet here we are with a government who are offering long term ‘cost rental’ as a solution to the current housing crisis.
I recently sat in my grandmother’s living room dreaming aloud about moving back to Dublin from Cork. Imagining all the support I could have rearing my two children near my extended family. The jobs both me and my partner could get. The only thing stopping me is where the fuck am I going to live? My grandmother went on to discuss my cousin recently buying his first holiday home, the pink pound my mum nudged me, as if being heterosexual and reproducing meant that I had blocked my chances of home ownership. As Eimear asks, what has happened since the land reforms of previous centuries? Why are we in this situation where we have 10,000 people in emergency accommodation. And crucially, where the fuck are we supposed to have sex?
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