Mad Max: Beyond Plunder-home.

The other week, I bought a chair on ebay. It’s a nice leather upholstered “Gentleman’s” chair, the type you might find in a Victorian Club, where the industrialists of the day would meet and discuss new ways to extract wealth from the empire.

I offered to pick up the chair from the sellers house not realising it was about an hours drive away in Enniskerry. Resigned, myself and my girlfriend decided to make a day of it and tried to enjoy the “Road Trip”.

We finally found our new ebay buddy and made the transaction exchanging the usual random pleasantries one does with a complete stranger. As I awkwardly bashed the chair into the modest rear of my hatch back the shrill sound of a house alarm could be heard in the distance. “Hear that?” our now €50 richer stranger asked, “That’s all I’ll be hearing for the next 10 hours”.

He went on to explain that he was a security guard and directly after the chair handover he would be making his way to work, where his job was to patrol and guard one of the many new “Ghost Estates” now littering once rural Ireland.

These are the housing estates build on the iridescent surface of the property bubble, on once farmland, out of town, pie cutter design. Now in the crunchier reality nobody is stupid enough to buy into these overpriced slums, even the cows that once grazed the field are happier just to rent in the adjacent patch.

I asked if the security guard got much trouble from the local youths with this new and destructible playground now at their feet. The guard said that it wasn’t kids he was guarding against but the builders who had built the estate. It had become such a problem the security number had recently been doubled.

These builders had completed the project but were never paid by the developer, as the house were un-sellable. They would amass in force under the cover of darkness armed with tools and flatbeds, to rip out anything of value from the houses themselves. Kitchens, copper wire, fittings and fixtures. Demolish what they had just completed building.
On being alerted to the rival faction the Security Guards would assemble on the opposing side of the street ready to protect the only real commodities to be found in the ghost estate.

When one thinks of Collapse it never plays out quiet like the post apocalyptic books and movies make out, for one thing where are all the hot robotic prostitutes I’m meant to be shagging? But this scenario is about as close to Mad Max are we are probably gonna get, where paper money is useless and the new currency is the increasingly scarce resources fought over by gangs of marauding brickies.

All over Ireland these commodity battles are being fought in the blackness of night, in the middle of nowhere.