It's all a bit pot and kettle, this Celtic Cub bashing, what with this generation of spoiled middle-agers ruining it for everyone, writes SHANE HEGARTY
HAVE A LOOK around you. Are there any late teens, early twentysomethings sitting close by? Apparently, you may sniff them out by the familiar perfume: the scent of entitlement.
Once you’ve grabbed one, check around the back for a label of some sort, it’s probably swinging from their brass neck. What does it read? “The Me Generation?” “If found please replenish credit card?” Or perhaps it confirms them to be that most damaged and, apparently, damaging of stereotypes: the Celtic Cub.
There are many things previous generations of young Irish did not have, and one of the chief shortcomings was of labels. Those born in any decade before the 1980s did not know the luxury of such easy identification. They weren’t the Net Generation or Generation Y or Generation Next or Generation Whatever or whatever.
Some of us might have fooled ourselves into thinking we squeezed into Douglas Coupland's very North American Generation X, but we were as close to that as to being in the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
But those who were born in the 1980s and early 1990s arrived into a culture in which labels were plentiful, cheap and disposable. And they have always proven to have a useful dual purpose: either as sticks to beat them with or tars to brush them with.
Such as when, as reported in last weekend's Irish Times,a few students and backpackers abroad act in a way that is, according to reports, far short of exemplary. An apartment owner is sick of the damage done by Irish partiers; a business won't employ them because of their behaviour.
In Wednesday's Irish Times, Angela Long followed up the report by describing this carry on as representative of a broader problem with the Celtic Cubs.
She blamed the Baby Boomer generation – a post-war American conceit imposed on an Irish context – for spoiling their children so much they became interested only in the pursuit of pleasure, their lives focused on “the primacy of the pub and the PlayStation”.
Online, some commenters piled in, using the Celtic Cub label as a slur, a shorthand for spoiled brats who don’t know how good they had it and who are now going to be kicked up the arse by a recession, just like previous generations were – which is why they were such good generations in comparison to this bunch of thuggish self-centred layabouts.
Here are a couple of comments. I’m going to presume they’re legitimate, but there is a hysteria that doesn’t rule out the possibility that someone’s having fun with the argument.
“After years of giving children a sense that they are all powerful with more rights than anyone else (cheered on by, among others, a myriad of rights-based organisations, eg ICCL) they then grow up to become foul-mouthed, good for nothings who believe the world owes them a living,” wrote one. “However, the silver lining may well be the recession.
“Hopefully, it will teach a long hard lesson to these layabouts (and their feckless parents who were afraid ever to say “NO”) that there is, ultimately, no such thing as free lunch . . . or a free job.”
And another: “Many (not all) are cock sure; and loud – very, very, very loud . . . Many are still wearing their Gucci watches (a hangover from the Celtic Tiger years) and know pretty much everything. Work-shy, self-entitled, spoilt middle-class children and\or scumbags with money . . . ruining the Irish reputation abroad.”
Which is amusing to many of the early J1 students, who would recognise themselves in that. My experience of an early-1990s J1 is of sometimes appalling behaviour by young Irish who would have fit exactly that same description, without the Gucci watch. We were still clinging to the Swatches.
Anyway, it took a good boom to come along and sort us out. And, thankfully, it produced a whole new generation of targets for the longstanding pastime that is Writing Off The Youth.
Usually, when doing so, there is some qualifier which explains: “Of course not all of them are bad. There are many bright, motivated . . . etc.” And yet, the minority are then held up as representative of the whole.
Of course, I’ve met many bright, motivated, well-behaved middle-aged people, and many of them are a credit to their post-war generation. It’s just a shame so many others have proven to be spoilt rotten – believing themselves entitled to two or more houses, to several holidays, to early retirement, unnecessarily big cars – and capable of terrible economic vandalism.
They’ve ruined Ireland’s reputation abroad by moving into banks and trashing them. Now, a lot of Irish can’t get jobs because of them. But will they take responsibility for their own actions? Or hand over their Gucci watches? No.
Instead, this generation of spoiled middle-aged people expect someone else to clean up their mess. They’ve just whipped out the credit card knowing the bill can be sent to the next generation: Generation Fecked.