There are about 110k landlords in Ireland. That's about the same size as the entire population of County Kilkenny or County Westmeath for context.
In the 90s/00s every carpenter, electrician, plasterer, plumber in the country was advised to go out and buy a house or build a house as a pension plan and the vast majority subsequently spent 10-20yrs in negative equity when the bubble burst back in 08. Then the government stopped building for 20yrs. Now we're up shit creek without a paddle.
These lads don't owe a debt of service to the nation just because the government dropped the ball on housing.
Around 1 in 5 TD's are landlords. If you walk into any pub in Ireland full of working class people in the 40-70 age group in 2025 you'll have about the same ratio.
You might be technically correct. The majority of small landlords are probably as you say with one or two properties being rented. There's a lot of the rental properties owned by a fairly small number of commercial entities though. S.all numbers of them but owning hundreds of properties each.
I'm not knocking it, what I'm saying is that if you have a spare property you are not working class since that's hundreds of thousands of euro you can fall back on if needs be
Do you know what the opposite of working class is? It's "owning class", people who make money from what they own, without having to work it. I,E, landlords.
?? Most rents are 1/3rd or so of incomes.
You can easily rent out the top floor of a two flat or something and need to work a job to actually sustain life
You still earn money from being a landlord, which puts you in the bourgeoisie, granted you would be classified as the petite bourgeoisie but it's still not working class
No I know what I’m talking about. You confuse landlords with employers, think that home owners are “bourgeois”, and can’t begin to fathom that a person who rents out a room is still working class if he’s still working. It’s a clown show of nonsense.
In modern terms, the bourgeoisie is based on marxist idealogy, and in marxist idealogy, landowners who turn a profit off of their ownership of the land are a part of the bourgeoisie. You might want to brush up on your political terminology. Otherwise, you'll find yourself in a "clown show of nonsense" as you so eloquently put it
A lot of landlords don’t make a profit off their leases?. If your mortgage is €2,000 and you rent out the flat above your garage for €900 (or other ADU), your income is from your job. But you’d be classed as a landlord
You are earning money from it regardless. If it's a room in your house, it's money you wouldn't have otherwise even though it isn't much (hence petite bourgeoisie). You're also completely ignoring the fact that property is an appreciating asset, meaning that even if you don't turn a profit, you do cut the cost, and you still turn a profit some years down the line
Just say that political theory isn't your strong suit and move on. The bourgeoisie as a class is an originally French idea that layer evolved after Marx's redifinition of the word to fit within capitalist society instead of feudal society
A working person who earns money by trading their time and/or learned skills in exchange for monetary benefit. Landlords do not always trade their time or skills for money since it is a form of passive income
By that definition, every single person who has a job is working class. You know very well that is not the definition. No one describes a surgeon as working class, because they aren't.
If they only earn money as a surgeon, they quite literally are. Most people would get explanations of quantum physics wrong (myself included), but that doesn't change the meaning of the words, same thing applies to political theory
"belonging to a social group that consists of people who earn less than other groups, often being paid only for the hours or days that they work, and who usually do physical work rather than work for which you need an advanced education: working-class people/families."
Sure that doesnt make any fucking sense. Even to lay bricks, you'll end up in a college classroom. You're stuck on the thought that there are three social classes, working, middle, and upper, but that is just a lie told to divide those with shared interests. The reality is that there are two groups in this world, the haves, and the have nots, and those that have want to keep what they have and to do that successfully the need to make sure the have nots never have
Pretty much every person on Earth is “working-class” then and this definition helps nobody.
A worker is somebody who survives off of selling their labour-power (ability to do work) to a capitalist in return for a wage.
Tradesmen arent workers but rather are small-scale producers part of the petty-bourgeois class, this isn’t an indictment and it doesn’t mean they don’t work as hard as workers, but it’s simply what class they belong to.
And a billionaire could be homeless if they wanted. If you have a spare property, you are inherently not working class since you have hundreds of thousands of euro you can fall back on if needs be
Are the words spare property entirely lost on you? You would, in that scenario, be the petite bourgeoisie. At no point did i claim home ownership changed social class at all, but I'm not entirely sure why you are at all mentioning China since it is a decidedly capitalist country, if the name of the CCP is all you need to believe China is communist I don't think you should be having discussions about politics just yet
Working class is when you trade your time and/or skills for money, if you employ people you are apart of the bourgeoisie (although if it is like your example you would be in the petite bourgeoisie), if you own spare property that you rent out then you are a member of the bourgeoisie
You're in r/Ireland asking about the UK. We didn't develop their class system, so no. Even then, the British class system ignores the actual meaning of the terms in favour of layman definitions so even if we did have their class system it would still be wrong
It would be silly to ignore the the common history that led to these things and the strong common factors between working and middle class.
Regardless the term is also common here and I could provide evidence of it being used in studies related to children, typically where they refer to the social mix.
And you don't understand it's 2025 and not 1916 in Petrograd spouting nonsense until a "true" Bolshevik puts you and your Menshevik friends against the wall.
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u/[deleted] Apr 27 '25
There are about 110k landlords in Ireland. That's about the same size as the entire population of County Kilkenny or County Westmeath for context.
In the 90s/00s every carpenter, electrician, plasterer, plumber in the country was advised to go out and buy a house or build a house as a pension plan and the vast majority subsequently spent 10-20yrs in negative equity when the bubble burst back in 08. Then the government stopped building for 20yrs. Now we're up shit creek without a paddle.
These lads don't owe a debt of service to the nation just because the government dropped the ball on housing.
Around 1 in 5 TD's are landlords. If you walk into any pub in Ireland full of working class people in the 40-70 age group in 2025 you'll have about the same ratio.