FOR A RECENTLY arrived Irish young one feeling her way around Washington DC, that first reception at the Irish Embassy was just a tiny bit intimidating. Arrayed before us were the 2010 Mitchell scholar nominees: a group of glossy-haired, pearly-toothed, beautifully mannered, ferociously bright 18- to 30-year-olds, armed with CVs bulky enough to make you weep. And, astonishingly, all they wanted was to go to an Irish university for a year.
“It could only be Ireland,” said one young man, elaborating with a misty-eyed account of the “lush green fields of the Emerald Isle” that he’d seen on Tour de France television footage. Calm down, I was thinking, feeling mildly guilty that my story of an enforced exit from the lush green fields due to a catastrophically collapsed bubble might burst his bubble. But he knew all about it. In fact, they all probably knew more about us than we knew about ourselves. Yet these “future leaders of America”, light years from the stereotype of sentimental Irish-Americans and with the world at their feet, had chosen to engage in a fiercely competitive process to spend a year in Ireland.
Over the past year, as I’ve grown to love the US, I’ve also found myself getting increasingly protective of Ireland – though not from foreign commentators giving us a lash. It’s been mainly against the whining, sneering, head-banging negativity of Irish people my own age who seem to have lost perspective on their relatively privileged lives. And this includes some of my own friends – the most confident, most educated, most travelled generation Ireland has ever seen. The one some like to call the “lost generation”.
Think about it: there isn’t a generation alive in Ireland today that hasn’t felt betrayed or “lost” at some stage. Those who were our age in the 1980s are now in their 40s or 50s and see the nightmare unfolding again. Many feel doubly betrayed seeing the same thing befall their children. The difference, though, is that many more of these children – us – are much better equipped to take on the world than any generation before us.
A lot of us are far from lost. We were the generation of free fees, plentiful credit and endless choice. We were at the heart of a global cult of youth and were encouraged to believe we could be and do whatever we wanted. Unlike our parents who, as students, took jobs for serious stuff, such as paying fees and scruffy bedsit rent, our part-time jobs were often about funding long, hedonistic summers in Asia or the US. Ireland may never see such a privileged cohort again. So who, exactly, should be raging here?
Maybe it’s the hundreds of thousands on the live register; the older, twice-betrayed people who may never work again and the early school-leavers who had a few good years on the booming construction sites and are now stuck on waiting lists for “upskilling” courses that may never materialise. If anyone is entitled to say, “what is there for me now?”, it’s them.
As for the rest of us, the ones who had most to gain from it all, maybe it’s payback time. And there is a model for this. Say what you like about them – and people have – but Generation Yes, the pro-Lisbon Treaty campaign, was set up by a group of young people who decided to take destiny into their own hands. They spent four solid months covering the country, campaigning, discussing and engaging. Maybe it’s time for Generation Yes Mark Two.
While the business of attaching blame and establishing “never again” regulatory mechanisms proceeds, and we’re still waiting for the Bernie Madoff-type heads-on-sticks that went some way to helping Americans move on, maybe it’s time for my generation to give up the whining and pontificating and finger-pointing.
With all the talk of losing our best and brightest to the US and Asia, nobody is mentioning the best and brightest who remain in Ireland. The ones who will be running the country in a few years and who we’ll be depending on to pull Ireland out of its current dark hole. The ones studying for terrifying professional exams and working 13-hour days for salaries a lot less than initially promised. One of them feels she almost has to apologise that she’s still in Ireland. “Well, I know it’s not great at the moment,” she says sheepishly, “but I actually still like it here.”
We are not the lost generation but the more we think that – and the more we hear it – the more we’ll believe it.
There’s a lot worth fighting for still.
Róisín Ingle is away
THIS WEEKEND
Róisín will be ...