A LANDLORD MEETS A LOCAL, NEAR UU MAGEE: A true-life scene

A LANDLORD (m, 45) and a LOCAL (m, 70) stand outside a coffee shop, in the neighbourhood of the UU Magee Campus. The LANDLORD finishes a phone call, as the LOCAL prepares to mount his mobility scooter. They don’t know each other. They strike up a conversation.

LANDLORD: That’s a fine café there.

LOCAL: Yep. It’s our local. 

LANDLORD: I’m surprised to see it round here. Like, I’m surprised to see how residential this area still is.

LOCAL: Changes are happening. There are lots of transient occupiers here. More coming. 

LANDLORD: That’s what has me here. I have two HMO houses further on up.

LOCAL: I need to be direct with you ...

LANDLORD: ... Fire away. I like direct ...

LOCAL: ... Direct and civil. I’m one of the long-term residents who strongly opposes the glut of HMOs in this area. So, directly – get out of the HMO business. You can still make money, renting your property, longterm, to a family or to adults, sharing. 

LANDLORD: The students leave the place in a heap when they ... 

LOCAL: Imagine living next door to that.

LANDLORD: (Laughs) I wasn’t great when I was at college.

LOCAL: Me neither. Crammed into dives in Ranelagh, near UCD Belfield, we were. Today’s HMOs are the modern equivalent. Get out of them. Rent to long-term tenants with proper contracts and penalties ...

LANDLORD: I consider myself a good landlord ...

LOCAL: No doubt, but, as long as you’re renting HMOs, you’re compounding the glut and all that goes with it. 

LANDLORD: The Agent tells me the market in HMOs is finished. 

LOCAL: Residents and the councils, here and across the water, are pushing back against them...

LANDLORD: He says emergency accommodation is the way to go now. The Holylands HMO market in Belfast is gone. It’s full of foreigners.

LOCAL: More people being exploited by bad conditions. Residents there are doing their best to have good living spaces for all, meanwhile ...

LANDLORD: The bottom line is the money.

LOCAL: You own the assets. The agent is using you, while abusing the people of this area. Get out of HMOs. Get out of transient occupation. Return your houses to the city’s rental stock and this’ll be an even nicer, mixed residential area.

LANDLORD: Why doesn’t the University build accommodation for students?

LOCAL: Best ask the University. The Magee University Campus Task Force report said the commercial sector would provide student accommodation. In Belfast that means specially built blocks. In Derry, it means people like you, private landlords, often not from here ...

LANDLORD: I’m from down South. I have properties in Armagh as well. No HMOs. Just rentals.

LOCAL: Why’s that?

LANDLORD: No university campus. No market for HMOs.

LOCAL: That so? University policy and practice, coupled with the bottom line for agents and landlords, degrading a fine residential area. 

LANDLORD: I wouldn’t mind another chat, if ...

LOCAL: You get out of HMOs and the like and, the next time you’re here, I’ll buy the buns and the coffees.

The LANDLORD re-enters the café. The LOCAL mounts his mobility scooter and departs.

THE 30:10 PLAY

            

The Guildhall hosts major civic events in our city and district. The second inquiry into the murder of citizens by state forces on Bloody Sunday 1972 took place in the Main Hall. I sat in the public gallery, amazed at the theatricality of the proceedings. And, theatre being part of my work, a stage play came to me, dramatising and poeticising the inquiry. Scenes from an Inquiry was produced by Sole Purpose Productions in 2002 and 2022. I adapted the play for radio and RTÉ Radio 1 broadcast it in 2003.

The Guildhall hosts meetings of Derry City and Strabane Council. The Council Chamber is smaller than the Main Hall, but the scene is just as theatrical. The dramatis personae are the elected representatives – councillors – arranged in two arcs, one above the other, facing towards a panel chaired by the Mayor, who is flanked by assistants and council officials. To the Mayor’s right and the councillors’ left is a small public gallery, again on two levels. The upper level is reached by a spiral staircase.

Councillors speak to the Mayor and the panel using microphones at their seats. Orientated front-facing, they talk side-ways to one another, their backs effectively turned on the public gallery. People in the gallery cannot speak to the councillors. When councillors use their microphones they are barely audible in the gallery. In theatrical and democratic terms, the audience is semi-excluded from events.

On June 25^th 2025 a full meeting of Derry City and Strabane District Council was held. The principal business was the passing of the new Local Development Plan (LDP) on the recommendation of the council’s Planning Sub-Committee. Members of the public were in the gallery, including neighbours of UU Magee, as well as letting agents and landlords handling Houses of Multiple Occupancy (HMOs).

The LDP is a major document for the future, laying out developments in areas of infrastructure, land usage, physical and economic development, environmental considerations and considerations of social improvement. A key element of the plan is the management of Houses of Multiple Occupancy (HMOs), particularly in the Northland area.

An increase in student numbers at the University of Ulster campus is a key driver for the future prosperity of the district. The current model for accommodating students is to have minimal bespoke buildings and to rely on commercial sector provision: by lodging with families and promoting the transfer of family houses to HMOs, essentially creating financial assets that can house as many people as possible, often in unregulated manners, in order to increase rental takings. 

The Council proceedings rested on a paradox. All councillors acknowledged there is a glut of HMOs in the Northland area. All agree, in principal, to a cap of 10% on HMOs in the area. However, at the meeting on the 25^th June, councillors voted through a Plan which included a cap of 30%. Why did they do this? There is a potent force coming from the University, implying that without a large number of HMOs an expansion of student numbers will not occur. Councillors fear being seen to oppose expansion at UU Magee, which has a hold over the city and district since the 1960s, when university and state authorities joined forces to site the western campus of the University in the town of Coleraine, rather than 80 kilometres further west in the second city, Derry. A cross-party and cross community campaign to welcome the new campus was underway. Now councillors are labelled as whiners and wingers by Belfast authorities when they query the ‘crumbs from the table’ model of resource allocation – ‘take what you’re getting and be thankful for it’ is the current mantra.

Some notable success in rebalancing university provision has been achieved after long years of lobbying by councillors and others, with the post-grad medical and applied health courses now at the Derry campus. Neighbours of UU Magee welcome these successes, though their streets are so congested the Fire and Rescue Service issue leaflets, advising that their vehicles may not be able to gain access; refuse collectors struggle to make collections; buses are delayed and re-routed; neighbours of HMOs call safety wardens and police to respond to problems of partying and noise.

Debate at the Council meeting was minimal. Some councillors spoke, most kept their heads down. The Plan, including a 30% cap on HMOs, was adopted, with two abstentions. Minister Gordon Lyons made a table of HMOs. Of 220 HMOs in the district, 172 are in the Northland area, around UU Magee. This gives an 80% glut, making a mockery of the 30% cap in the plan and way above the 10% cap advised by residents and desired by councillors. 

What kind of play might could be made from this? A tragedy? A comedy? A farce? Title? The 30:10 Play. Like much of the human experience, a combination of all three is likely. There was no drama at the meeting, though the sight of some men leaving early suggested they were landlords/agents/developers, satisfied that, once again, the balance was falling to their side rather than to residents. They could get on with the exploitation of much-needed housing stock for short-term private gain. The real drama is happening on the streets, adjacent to the UU Magee campus. 

What use would a play be? Theatre can hearten people facing challenges, especially difficult issues like a glut of HMOs. My play Scenes from an Inquiry faced a difficult issue in our city and district, in a period of intense political crisis. A Unionist member of the Policing Board, who attended a performance, told me he learned more about the lived, human experience of Bloody Sunday and the Inquiry at the play than from the books he read, the interviews he’d heard and the films he watched. 

Is that not something?

An edited version of this blog post appeared in Derry Journal on-line.

Dave Duggan’s latest work is a collection of essays on his life and practice as a writer: Journeywork, a creative life (Nerve Centre, 2024), described as ‘luminous’ in an Irish Times review. Dave is currently recording an audiobook version.

www.facebook.com/Dave DugganWriter

DO BOOKS CHANGE THE WORLD?

A writer with a successful book was interviewed by a journalist at an event recently. Success in this case is measured in awards and sales. The book is an international bestseller. It won a Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction.

It details an horrific incident in the Occupied Territories of Palestine, when young children, caught up in a traffic accident, burned in their school bus, while on a day trip. One teacher and six children died. Many more were injured.

The response to the incident and the treatment of locals, who came to the aid of the people on the bus, is recounted in chilling detail. The responses of forces from the Israeli state and the Palestinian Authority were atrocious. Their treatment of the people first on the scene was dreadful.

The writer was measured and calm. He described the book, how it came into being and how it was organised. His aim in writing it was to interest readers by using one specific horror to open people’s eyes to the reality of the abuse of people in the Occupied Territories and, relatedly, in Gaza. He used the term ‘apartheid’ to describe the situation there.

The conversation centred on the writer’s work and personal experience. The people he wrote about faded into the background. He revealed he had been searching, in a journalistic manner, for an incident from which to develop a book that would galvanise, particularly American, readers and produce action. This idea had the whiff of ‘ambulance chasing’ about it.

In the Q&A, following the interview, it was evident that members of the audience were left helpless and hopeless. We had shared a vicarious experience of the pain of others and, while we might be moved sentimentally, we were unlikely to be moved viscerally.

I offered some suggestions from the floor that might give us some hope, by noting the resilience of the people of Palestine and another response to an instance of apartheid. Mary Manning and a group of workers in a Dunnes Store Supermarket in Dublin in 1984 refused to handle Outspan oranges from South Africa. They went on a lengthy strike. Ireland became the first Western country to introduce a ban on goods from South Africa. I suggested we support Palestinian civil society organisations and also Israeli groups who are anti the Netanyahu regime, anti the Occupation of the West Bank and anti the war on Gaza. Groups and actions such as B’Tselem, Not in Our Name and Zochrot. I suggested we chose Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) at a personal level and advise our organisations and governments to do so also.

The writer’s book was offered as an example of how books change the world.

Noreen Masud writes about ‘books changing the world’ in TOLKA 8, an Irish literary journal of non-fiction. She complains that

The people around me kept saying that books would change the world. But no one was acting on what books told us. Here, books were a fetish object, to be revered and celebrated and admired, but never taken into yourself, to change and steer you forever after.

Masud and fellow members of Fossil Free Books succeeded in putting the run on asset managers Baillie Gifford, who were profiteering from arms sales and fossil fuels industries. Baillie Gifford pulled out of sponsoring literary festivals, thereby reversing their lit-wash - the use of literature to cover nefarious investments in death-dealing products and activities, comparable to sports-washing.

Their success illustrates the truth that people, not books, change the world, though books can help people who want to change the world in the direction of peace with justice.

Edward Said wrote a book that, if it didn’t change the world, did change the language, by intruding a new word and concept into discussions about Palestine and surrounding countries: Orientalism.

Perhaps that’s the best we can hope for. Change the language, so that people can create new words, then act to change the world.

Language creates reality. We can use our shared and limited vocabularies to discourage any single belief system from dominating others, often at the expense of liberty. We can expand our vocabularies. We can expand the range of people we hold as ‘us’ rather than exclude as ‘them’.

Then we can act. Like Mary Manning and her colleagues, singularly and collectively - acting against apartheid and changing the world.

And for a view of the background to the Palestine situation today, consider Rashid Khalidi's Hundred Years' War on Palestine. Khalidi was a friend and colleague of Edward Said. 

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: A Palestine Story, book, Nathan Thrall, Penguin, London, 2024 

Tolka 8, journal, Dublin, 2024

Hundred Years' War on Palestine, book, Rashid Khalidi, Profile Books, London, 2020

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And the contradiction comes precisely where the economic system cannot possibly satisfy that desire, if only because, as production and automation become more and more sophisticated, unemployment increases, so the public that is being stimulated into desiring more will also have no means to fulfil that desire.*

The elevation of the late Pope Francis to the status of ‘brand’ was achieved at his funeral in Vatican City. The stamp FRANCISCVO on his stone tomb in an ornate basilica marks his elevation into the ranks of single-word human brands such as RONALDO, BONO and TRUMP. He joins APPLE, GOOGLE, TESLA, DUNHILL, AMAZON and NIKE in the pantheon of big brands.

FRANCISCVO’S schtick is humility, a weightless commodification of a widespread human quality, in the same manner as innovation, excellence and performance are also commodified in the service of the world’s leading brands.

There is a hollowness in this abrogation of the words, which the desires of consumers can occupy and thus feel sated, at least temporarily. Images of priests and bishops raising iphones to capture images and selfies at FRANCISCVO’S funeral make this branding manifest. They are not present at a solemn, liturgical rite, but consuming a death-gig.

Sainthood beckons as the next elevation, possibly on a five-year schedule, enabling the brand to become FRANCISCVO SUPERIORE.

TRUMP’S schtick is disdain. He is a lout, delivering disdain on a mass scale. The disdain of the powerful creates fear, which drives consumption.

TRUMP says he favours manufacturing, desiring to bring US production back to America. Behind TRUMP’S desire is a failure to understand that these brands are not American, but global. Manufacturing goes anywhere labour is cheaper, costs are lower, tax regimes more amenable and profits are higher. 

APPLE dodges tariffs by moving production from China to India, not to America. Workers at the INTEL chip-manufacturing plant in Ireland fear for their jobs, as the owners of the brand move to ‘trim non-core activities’ in order to boost profits. Non-core activities are performed by non-core people, who will be disdained and dismissed.

It is good old-fashioned ‘action at a distance’. Like physics, economics inhabits fields of action across which no apparent connections exist in order to benefit the few over the many. It is casino-capitalism. The people holding the most chips gain the most. 

TRUMP is no more than a casino player, a carpet-bagger, in the style of the American Old West. New towns, new frontiers, new wealth, not for universal well-being, but for accumulation and concentration by adherents of the TRUMP brand.

Stocks are tossed about like confetti, as he plays green light/red light with tariffs, so that he and his adherents can make gross profits. The rest of us can have his disdain and nothing else.

ISRAEL’S schtick is self-defence. The brand is tarnishing itself before its consumers’ eyes, with continuing aggression, massacres, denials, cover-ups and lies, as it out-terrorises the terrorists.

Fear and desire drive consumption. 

In each of these instances, the brands act at a distance, stimulating desire that is never satisfied. The desire itself is commodified and gathered for production and automation ends, such as training AI software. Even the trivialising images of the clerics will be gobbled by the digital maws that underpin the brands.

Which is the best brand to consume? FRANCISCVO’S humility, with its gold jewellery, scarlet robes, snow-white finery, and multi-billion dollar property portfolio, and not a woman in sight of the main table? Or TRUMP’S disdain, with its self-interest, exploitation and destruction? Or ISRAEL’S self-defence, fronting self-interest that validates massacres?

Whichever we choose we end up living by a brand, desiring all it offers and never gaining satisfaction.

*The Years Of Theory: Post-war French Thought to the Present Day

Frederic Jameson, Verso, London, 2024 

See also blogpost: The Age of the Lout

https://breathingwithalimp.blogspot.com/2022/07/the-age-of-lout.html

Philosophy is thus both a universal aim of reason and, simultaneously, one that manifests itself in completely specific moments.*

 

Rory McIlroy achieved a specific moment of golf, which may or may not be reasonable, depending on your sporting tastes, when a dimpled, white ball trundled over a pristine green sward to end its chug-a-chug progress by falling into a neat round hole, with a satisfying chutter.

He achieved his aim of universal validation, as millions of viewers, on-site and in front of screens, witnessed the specific moment. That moment achieved the universal aim of commercial success for the tournament organisers, their sponsors and for all the business interests that benefit from golf.

Emotions soared, at the green-side and far away, principally delight and relief.

McIlroy is the well-mannered son of loving parents. He speaks clearly and modestly, when interviewed by public media. He is their darling. 

Being from the north-east of Ireland, he has learned to negotiate a complex triangle of political, religious and national identities that befuddles other public figures. His approach is to use them all, as and when they suit him. And to ignore them when they don’t.

In this, he is like many wealthy people. He can ‘rise above it all’. Nonetheless, specific moments trouble him. The Olympics required him to pick a flag and anthem combo, both versions of which made him uncomfortable. He let the Olympics go by. Besides, there was no money in it.

Being from Northern Ireland, Rory McIlroy can carry both British and Irish passports, thus he can be a subject of a monarch and a citizen of a republic at the same time, a very useful two par. He may have a specific moment of reasoning when, as is likely, the British Crown offers him an honour later this year.

Some people, not all of them golf fans, are uncomfortable with this and advise he choose either/or. Others see him as a celebrity success of the outworking of the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. 

While Article 40.2 of the Irish Constitution says that no Irish citizen can accept a title of nobility or honour from a foreign state without the approval of the government, it’s a hole-in-one certainty that such approval would follow. It’s up to Rory which club to play at this hole, needing to stay out of the water, while still making the green. 

Will he then wheel along in a golf-buggy to appease the US President, who is a golf enthusiast, as the tariff war launched by the Trump regime runs its course, whenever the regime’s inside-market trader profits max out?

Rory is a multi-millionaire. His own financial dealings include substantial gifts to favoured charities, including MENCAP. False reports that he gave his bulging winner’s wallet from the US Masters Tournament to the learning disability charity soured the immediate aftermath of the win. It is all part of being a celebrity sports star and, as with most things in life, Rory will play his way out of the rough.

He persists. 

That is his specific talent and the universal aim for all humans striving for success as the world currently defines it. It leads to various forms of exceptionalism. Rory, and his fellows, comprise the exception, which the media determines universal.

The commercial and sporting worlds follow Rory. Millions of people, oblivious to his activities, experience specific moments of the unreasonableness of these worlds and their universal pursuit of profit.

*The Years Of Theory: Post-war French Thought to the Present Day

Frederic Jameson, Verso, London, 2024 

www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter

The history of philosophy is not a history of ideas: it is a history of problems*

Ideas are problems. 

The idea that a liberal democracy can call itself that, even as it re-commences modern manoeuvre warfare on a human population corralled into a narrow terrain beside the Mediterranean Sea is a problem of politics.

UNICEF reports that 14,500 children have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war, more than the number of children killed in 4 years of wars worldwide. 25,000 children have been injured. Gaza has the highest number of child amputees per capita in the world. 17,000 children have been separated from their parents or find themselves unaccompanied. Over a million children have been displaced. 

These are terrible figures. The war has destroyed almost all essential infrastructure. Sunday newspapers report the finding of a mass grave, where Israeli forces buried 15 paramedic and rescue works near Rafah. 

These figures arise from a programme of terror.

The idea of a liberal democracy responding to terrorist actions in that manner is a problem for humanity. Will the perpetrators survive such an idea? Will humans survive such an idea?

The idea that leading world liberal democracies advance their economies by manufacturing and exporting weapons of war used in the programme of terror on Gaza is a problem.

These are problems of politics and justice. And philosophy. 

The philosophical pursuit of wisdom involves facing into general and fundamental problems.

The idea that mercantilism, as driven by the current US administration, led by President Trump, can provide an approach to world affairs in the 21st century, when it failed in the 18^th century, is a problem of economics. And philosophy.

What philosophy is behind the switch from globalisation with limited tariffs and light regulation to full-on tariff-setting and tightening of export-import regulations? High tariffs, especially on manufactured goods, are a feature of mercantilist philosophy. And a problem.

It is a re-working of Trussonomics: the idea that tax cuts for the wealthy makes economies grow in the long term, regardless of pressure from the casino capitalists in the international stock markets. And that pressure is mounting.

The idea that resources such as land, sea, minerals; great tracts of fertile terrain; large numbers of human beings, can be sacrificed for conversion into profit in the practice of mercantilism is a problem for economics. And for philosophy.

The idea that a globally successful tv drama on Netflix called Adolescence could be used to push back against the behaviour the drama presents has taken hold in many countries. This idea is a problem of child-rearing and of the philosophy of education.

Teachers have just called off strike action where I live, in an effort to address problems with their work-load. Appeals to broadcast Adolescence in schools, in an effort to educate young people away from asocial and violent behaviour, are publicly made. The appeals pay no heed to the workload problems well-documented by teachers. 

Netflix’s interest’s are commercial. The idea that one of their programmes would alter behaviour away from violence is mistaken. Individual artists working on programmes for the platform may have other interests, such as education and social change. Netflix gains by having such ideas associated with their commercial interests. It uses AI-reinforced algorithms to tailor the advertising of content for each of its over 300 million paying viewers worldwide. 

Netflix is a grand scale influencer. The idea behind an influencer is to gain subscribers, who will use products uncritically. This is a problem of social harmony. And philosophy.

Influencers used to be called publicists or advertisers. In this and many other cases, they use fear as a means of controlling behaviour: fear that if I don’t view the platform I will miss out on something; fear that I will not be cool; fear that I will not learn something vital to my life and to the lives of my children.

Clockwork Orange (Heinemann, 1962) by Anthony Burgess and Cathy Come Home by Ken Loach (BBC, 1966) are historical instances of art proclaiming against the social problems of youth violence and homelessness. That both youth violence and homelessness persist today points to a problem of art. And of philosophy.

My theatre sequence Plays in a Peace Process (Guildhall Press, 2008) dramatised problems in the Northern Ireland Peace Process. The fact that these problems, though diminished, still persist is a problem of the philosophy of applied dramatic art.

Ideas are the problems. Solutions are ideas too. 

More philosophy?

* The Years Of Theory: Post-war French Thought to the Present Day

Frederic Jameson, Verso, London, 2024

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