The flight was uneventful, save for the landing. One of hundreds of passengers, I was a student at the time, returning from a summer working in Toronto. Bouncing from job to job like a pinball, picking up dollars here, tossing them over bar counters there, I had sold iced tea on North King Street in unbearable humidity; I had checked bags and purses at the University Bookstore during the pre-term rush. And now I was finished.
As we broken the clouds over Co Clare, runway lights flickered beneath us - beckoning with hazy, neon arms. Coughing with turbulence, the plane lined up for landing. Of course, we didn't crash. Sorry to disappoint. Nor do I have a moment of heroism, wholesale panic or even the odd heart attack to report. The reality reads more trivially. Seeing those lights emerge from the muck brought home to me that we were passing in darkness between two countries. Canada was behind us, Ireland in front. Suddenly, the past four months were memory; the rest of my life lay one phone-call away in a soulless airport. Most of all - and this is why I will never forget that landing - I felt for the first time, truly, that I was going home.
Ever since, home for me has been an emotion. Maybe that's got as much to do with the fact I pay £300 a month for a cruddy bedsit, but growing up, home was a place where breakfast appeared, as if by magic, on the kitchen table. Home was a given - it was where you parked your bike, where you hacked your way through homework, where you slept. Probably, if things went to plan, I would end up in a nice, detached house somewhere, a house I would own and in which I would keep my stuff.
Now, of course, I have a snowball's chance in hell of being in the position to buy a house. At current recommended lending multiples (two and a half times one income plus one year's salary of the second), a Garda earning £25,000 and a nurse earning the same amount can now hope to stretch a £90,000 loan between them with a deposit of 10 per cent saved. I earn less than both. Not that it matters - the cheapest new homes on the market are priced in the region of £105,000 to £125,000. I am of the rental class, it turns out.
"Home is a story of who we used to be, who we are today and how we got from there to here," Patrick T. Reardon wrote last month in the Chicago Tribune. "And where we may be going." Reading his article brought to mind for me that epiphanic plane journey, the feeling it rolled over in my belly, and the fact any aspirations I harboured of owning my own property have long since exploded in a welter of zeroes. As must surely be the case for many of my generation.
How has this thing we call home evolved so quickly as a physical object and as an idea? How has it changed and how has it not? How have so many come, in the space of three or four years, to see obliterated aspirations towards owning a home of our own? There is a chasm of difference between the 800 hostel beds that exist in Dublin City - used by 6,500 to 7,000 different individuals each year - and a bedsit in Ranelagh. There is a chasm of difference too, between a bedsit in Ranelagh and 51 Morehampton Road, a three-bedroom semi-detached Victorian home expected to fetch £720,000 plus when it is auctioned on December 1st. And there is a chasm of difference between 51 Morehampton Road and Trump Tower. But there are some similarities too.
Fundamental to any home is the concept of shelter. Human beings need walls and roofs (or their equivalent) to keep warm, to eat, sleep, let down their hair and rest untroubled by marauding beasts and burglars. Shelter is something a £1 million penthouse in Dun Laoghaire Harbour has in classy abundance. Shelter is something a hostel can provide, just about. Shelter is something that doesn't exist at the highest point of the curve on the Ha'penny Bridge.
Fundamental to any home is the concept of privacy. We go home to get some space, to detach ourselves from society, to pull on those old tracksuit bottoms and collapse in front of the TV. We go home to relax. We go home to spend time with our families, to get ready before we go out, to make amiable messes and settle into familiar nooks and cosy crannies.
This is not true for all. For our culture, privacy is essential. To members of the League of the Iroquois, five Native American tribes who lived in what is now New York state, it would have been bizarre. Their home was the longhouse, a structure of wood and bark measuring 20 feet wide and up to 200 feet long. Maybe a dozen families lived in each, sharing fires, possessing hardly anything except what was held in common. Viking dwellings unearthed in Temple Bar showed many lived together under the one roof. In the years immediately preceding the famine, up to half of the Irish population lived in windowless mud cabins of a single room.
Was it the fireplace? Was it the food? Few hearths burn in city kitchens today. More and more meals in Ireland are eaten on the go. Women are no longer obliged to measure out their lives with teaspoons, babies gurgling at their ankles. And yet, paradoxically, state-of-the-art appliances walk out of home improvement stores. The less we use our kitchens, it seems, the smarter they get. Columba Faulkner, National Secretary of St Vincent De Paul, says people arrive in the charity's shelters for all sorts of reasons - "broken marriages, soaring rent costs, addictions". But once there, they are taught "life skills, basic cooking and so on". The kitchen is important. "We don't encourage them to get institutionalised," she says. "We try to encourage them to move on."
Fundamental to any home is the concept of location. But location means different things to "house" and "home". In property terms, you sell the former but you buy the latter. Witness the interest with which developers follow the morphing of various "zones" around urban centres, and the fact that a young family often buys a house because of its proximity to a school, a place of work, or to other family members.
In its original clothes, zoning was intended to stabilise property values, working to set aside some areas for homes, others for factories and others for business. Whether it still does this is open to debate, but certainly zoning was instrumental in homogenising city outskirts. The sweeping impact of suburbia in the 20th century has been nothing short of spectacular. Typically, housing gobbled up agricultural land; in Dublin, at least, it is serviced by a transport infrastructure that would embarrass a camel, and is so spread out that it cannot sustain a social infrastructure. Where once houses were individually designed for their opulent owners, now they are standardised to a degree that would have been inconceivable before Victorian times. In the Industrial Age, houses came in tight rows, accommodating workers in inner city anatomies. This century, for the privileged, they became brighter, warmer and easier to care for. A plumbing revolution endowed all but the most unfortunate with running water and indoor toilets. Most recently, we have accessorised. Televisions, washing machines, refrigerators, dishwashers and microwaves are now as ubiquitous as 19th century sods of turf.
Two out of three US households now own their own home. An impressive achievement - but one which comes at a broader cost. We can't go on sprawling forever, suburbs seeping outwards like white of egg. By 2010 Ireland's population will have reached 4.5 million, an increase of 800,000 souls in just 10 years. At some stage we will have to decide whether we can fulfil a promise toted by every political party - decent, safe, affordable homes for all. But when? Does the answer lie with £6 billion-worth of social housing, as unveiled in the recent National Plan?
I am at as much of a loss here as the next man, paddling along on a raft of statistics. Take just one: in 1996, the last year for which there is an available figure, 27,427 people were awaiting local authority housing in Ireland.
There is no way of knowing how many people are homeless in Ireland as the millennium turns over. "Homeless people are mobile, on the move; they don't stay in one place long enough to be counted," says a spokesperson for Focus Ireland. "We can only count people who come into contact with our services," adds Mary Higgins of the Eastern Health Board's Homeless Initiative. "There's a lack of clarity. We need to tidy up our definitions."
SINCE man learned to rub two sticks together, home has been a state of mind, a concept of how to live as well as a physical necessity. To what extremes people wish to take interpretation of that phrase - physical necessity - may be left to the size of their wallet and the ostentatiousness of their tastes, but there are basics everyone requires. Surely that includes Bill Gates, who has recently completed a $100 million home in Washington state, as much as refugees queueing in Mount Street? Surely that includes the citizens of Lucan as much as it does Ireland's Travelling community? Surely that includes residents of Millionaires' Row in Malahide as much as it does millions of dispossessed in Calcutta, Rio de Janeiro or any major metropolis in Africa?
For Ernest Hemingway, home was a place to which he could return when adventuring was done. To Le Corbusier, the house was "a machine for living". For me, home is rounding that last bend. It is listening to the familiar gearshift as the car veers off the main road. It is the seductive mix of anticipated comfort, me-ness, and family that will simmer over a weekend with quirky madness. It is remembering that plane touching soil. Since I will never own one of my own, home is my parents' place by default. It is a desire to see what, if anything, is left of me there.
I only wish everybody could share that feeling.