Irish getting a bad name as over-indulged kids of baby boomers wreak havoc in singular pursuit of pleasure, writes ANGELA LONG
IF YOU’RE Irish, come into the parlour . . . where the forces of law and order will be waiting to read you the riot act. An article in this newspaper last Saturday about the behaviour of some young Irish people in the US has been one of the most read pieces on irishtimes.com and it must have made many parents stop and think.
One young Dubliner, spending the summer on the west coast, was quoted as saying that “a lot of places don’t even consider hiring Irish students because of their reputation”.
Thousands of dollars of damage were said to have been done in a resort in California by young Irish trashing the place in the old rock-star fashion – microwaves in the swimming pool and other high jinks.
And it seems that the kids are not confining their anti-social exploits to the US. Anecdotes have also been doing the rounds about Irish students in Canada – where many have gone this year – getting dog’s abuse in the street, and a hysterical older woman in a bathroom in Malaga, screaming that she hated “you Irish kids”.
In Australia, the antics of Irish backpackers have for years infuriated residents of places like Coogee in Sydney, a beachside suburb and popular hostel destination.
These are straws in the wind perhaps, but taken with the number of times people talk about the primacy of the pub and the PlayStation for the teens and early 20s, it could be time to take a serious look at the issue. There would be nothing wrong with the pursuit of pleasure if it was just a small part of life, as it was for earlier generations. But when it has become life in its totality, something has gone wrong in the balance of those who grew up during the heady days of the Celtic Tiger.
Obviously not all “The Young” are like this, not even the majority. I know plenty of young people, at both work and home; they are funny and smart, and generally good-mannered. The older ones tend to be very worried about their future, understandably, and are knuckling down to work, any work, even the pernicious, and unpaid internships. Added to this, there are the young adults involved in advocacy work and campaigning, those whom Ruairí McKiernan of SpunOut said recently cannot see the point in dreary conventional politics.
However, complaints from home-grown employers about the attitudes of young workers, or rather the work-averse, have been reported for years now, targeting the Net Generation, the Text Generation or whatever label you choose. Younger workers want to have fun at work, and to work when they want. Not a bad aspiration – but not in the real world.
What have we, the oldies who formed them, done? Quite simply, we spoiled them. And then we allowed promotion of a culture in which the way to have fun was to get stone drunk.
Ireland’s GDP tripled between the late 1970s and the late 1990s. It’s natural enough to want to make life better for your children, better than it was for you.
Those of us in middle age, late baby boomers, often experienced the post-war fillip, the desire by the older generation to forget the privations of the war, and give their kids a more comfortable life. So our lives were better than our parents, even if it was a matter of having a washing machine, a car, multiple radios – things that were small luxuries in the 1950s.
Then there was TV, colour TV, and an entertainment explosion so that every house now is stuffed with toys. They are toys for children as they grow so even 30-somethings can spend a happy day in communion with the X-box.
And this trend collided with the new liberalism, the “me-generation” attitude. This laid down that if it felt good, you did it, and as long as you couldn’t be arrested for it, that was fine.
And in there too was this feeling that you had to be buddies with your kids, one big happy family shooting the breeze together.
I know of one father who introduced his sons to pornography before they were teenagers, all in the cause of buddydom (that family broke up).
In the 20th century Irish people worked to quash a reputation abroad for fecklessness, drunkenness, and amiability mixed with an inability to knuckle down. Serious and well-intentioned people like Frank Aiken, and later Mary Robinson, gained international stature and cemented a new, elevated, image of the Irish. The accomplished, personable civil servant or business leader upped our game.
So is one side of the national split personality rearing up to damage the other? It is horrible to think of US employers mentally putting up a “no Irish need apply” sign because of misadventures with spoilt kids who refused to accept they were expected to turn up every day, work the hours agreed, and be sober on the job. But in our eagerness to cherish our children, perhaps that’s what we’ve created.
Vincent Browne is on leave