Dublin: The city of Ozymandians

I am not given to quoting poetry. Don't know much about it, really. But sometimes a great poet captures an observation and it can't be improved upon. This poem is 'Ozymandias' by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Have a read...

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Quite. I mention this because the latest census release now shows that the average Dublin City household comprises of exactly 2.5 people. This is down from 3.0 in 1990 and 4.0 in 1960.
So we're not living together as much as we did and for lots of reasons. We're getting divorced. We're rearing children in single-parent families. We have more widows and widowers. Our children are fewer and more mobile.
Also, we have been accumulating assets at a fiercesome rate. The Irish penchant for buying house has never abated.
One of the things that surprised me from the released of the stats is that fewer grown-up 'children' are living at home. The number of people in their 20s and 30s living at home in Ireland has fallen nearly 10 per cent between 2002 and 2006. This at a time when house price inflation was said to be confining children to their native homes forever.
We have been making money and we have been turning it into assets via cheap mortgages. For sure, many have been left behind but a huge number of us are empire building.
At the same time the traditional family is under pressure. It's going out of fashion. Fewer than one in five households in Dublin City are now made up of the traditional family of husband, wife and children. Cohabiting is on the increase but one just a third of them have children. Of the trad families with children, two kids is the most popular number.
So we have been getting ourselves rich over the past fifteen years. We been cutting deals and talking house prices over dinner. We have had less time for kids or each other.
The question is: what are we going to do with the goodies? What will become of these assets? We think we are so hard headed, building up our stash in bricks.
But the fact is that most of us will never sell these gaffs. We won't asset strip them and head off on the journey of a lifetime. We'll give them to the kids.
We'll build it all up and then we will return to the dust without ever seeing the cash. This is sort of reassuring - we're not doing it for the money after all.
Like Ozymandias our little empires will wither and dissapate with us. There are, however, two possible negative outcomes we should ponder. Firstly, the next generation might be spoiled by the free assets we will leave them. And secondly, we seem to be much better at building houses than households.