OPINION:Ireland's young people have the sort of can-do mentality, combined with education and confidence, that is needed to lift the country out of its gloom. We cannot do it without them, writes MARY McALEESE
I'VE BEEN following with great interest The Irish TimesYoung Ireland series over the past week as the various young contributors have articulated their views of Ireland's current economic situation and their proposals to resolve it. They have written with passion and for the most part with a positivity that is shared with their peers, for the weekend opinion poll shows a great majority of young people are optimistic about the future.
They are not now and never have been passive spectators in the shaping of the future. In the past few months alone I have been involved in celebrating significant anniversaries of game-changing organisations which were initiated by young men and women, like the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Movement, the Free Legal Aid Centres, the Simon Community and the Union of Students in Ireland, not to mention the liberation of much of eastern Europe which gained momentum thanks to the courage of the young. In fact it is sometimes forgotten that the initiative for the very founding of this State was taken by young adults.
So it is heartening, but not altogether surprising, that Ireland’s young people, faced with a tough economic landscape, have the drive and vision to see the further shore and to aim for it no matter how hard the journey. Just look at the turnaround that young people are working for in Dublin’s Fatima Mansions, in Moyross and Southill in Limerick, and the investment hundreds of thousands of young people all over Ireland are making day in and day out in their education, training and their own strengths as problem solvers, as copers with life’s ups and downs. There is worry, anger and grief in abundance in many hearts and homes right now and it is particularly tough for our young people who grew up through those heady golden years when Ireland turned its back on the relentless haemorrhage of emigration, high unemployment and underachievement.
That surge of prosperity brought huge benefits to Ireland, many of which, it is important to remember, will survive this ebb tide.
It has also brought an unhappy legacy of personal and communal debt and reduced job opportunities which will impact deeply on our young people who now face much harsher realities than they had previously factored into their futures. We had dared to hope that this kind of adversity was a thing of history in Ireland but now we have to do what it takes to make sure it is as short-lived in its damaging effects as possible.
Many people of all ages have had their woes compounded by the flood and storm damage inflicted on thousands of homes and businesses in recent days. They have wept and been worn out but they have found in themselves and in the help that has come from all quarters, the strength to fight back and to try to begin all over again.
These days remind us just how great a resource we have in our people, in their individual talents and generosity and in our ability to work together in groups and communities wherever the need arises.
We have never given in to the counsel of despair as those who have lived through a litany of past national and individual adversities can testify.
Instead we have shown a resilience and endurance, an ambition and an ingenuity which has brought us from the lassitude of poverty and “ceann faoi” to the confidence and courage of “can-do”.
While our political leaders work to construct national solutions, each one of us in our homes, workplaces and communities has work to do in giving that other and vital leadership that will help us get to grips with our problems.
Very quickly we are adapting to these changed times with increased resourcefulness and thriftiness, less waste, more volunteering, more upskilling and engagement in education, more self-sacrifice and greater pragmatism in terms of expectations.
Often it is our young people who are showing the way.
They have a confidence that eluded past generations and that comes from being the best educated ever on this island and high among the best educated in the world. They are well travelled and culturally sophisticated, mixing as they do in a very new contemporary multicultural Ireland where virtually every major modern hi-tech industrial player has a presence and where indigenous entrepreneurialism has never been so prominent.
They are smart enough to know that they live in a highly progressive, developed first-world country, one that is globally mainstreamed, technologically and infrastructurally advanced and successful in many spheres, one that punches way above its weight.
They have lives that are rich in arts, culture, heritage, sports, community life and a commitment to social responsibility for the excluded at home and in the developing world.
They are big enough to learn from the avoidable mistakes which brought us one step back from our two giant leaps forward. They are determined enough to have faith in Ireland’s ability to transcend these setbacks and to find our way towards a sounder widespread prosperity again.
The truth is we cannot do it without them for our young people are a key bridge to a future of sensible renewed economic growth and the opportunities it will bring.
They are not facing into that future or this turbulent period in a vacuum for we all live within a context that has considerable strengths despite its challenges. Among them there is an historic peace, so new and embryonic that it will take many generations to reveal its full range of possibilities but already it is visibly seeding a co-operative culture of good neighbourliness on and between these islands such as has never been experienced by any previous generation.
The past decades of youth-draining emigration have ironically created for us a now powerful global emigrant family which expresses its links to Ireland in an extraordinarily effective worldwide ambassadorship on our behalf. It transmits and refreshes our culture, invests heavily in our peace and makes important and powerful friends for Ireland in industry, commerce and politics all over the world.
Our young people are growing up inside a European Union which itself came into being as a direct response to the worst catastrophe ever to befall the citizens of Europe. Instead of collapsing into perpetual enmity and permanent failure, they built a success story of collegial partnership between nations without parallel in the history of humankind. Its deepest impulse is ever optimistic and ever convinced of our collective and individual power to change things for the better.
Our young people have been steeped in that spirit from birth.
They are also made of the spirit that drove Sharon Commins and many others like her, whether as missionaries or secular aid workers, to dedicate the best years of their lives to bringing hope to the world’s poorest and most oppressed. They are the least likely to give in or give up when confronted with an obstacle.
In his poem From the Canton of Expectation, Seamus Heaney described the first generation of young people to benefit from widened access to education as having "intelligences, brightened and unmannerly as crowbars".
Those intelligences have already “crowbarred” many an embedded obstacle out of the way to Ireland’s progress. For a brief moment, we were tempted to believe that the worst of the obstacles had been shifted and ahead lay a straight and smooth road. Now we know that every generation has to put its weight to the crowbar for each faces its own expected and unexpected impediments that stand between it and the destiny it desires.
The ambient mood tells us no one wants to stay mired where we are. Our young people are telling us they are willing to work hard themselves, together, across the island, across the generations so that we can regain the momentum which will take us to the Ireland we all want, where as the Proclamation exhorts, we cherish the children of the nation equally.
The Young Ireland series in The Irish Timespowerfully demonstrates this is not a time for paralysing self-doubt but for the chastened courage and determination that our young people have in abundance.
A famous Irish sportsman once rallied his team with the (edited!) words “Where’s your pride?” Our pride is in reading and hearing the voices of our young citizens whose faith in their country is unshakeable and who believe that we will between us, reach that further shore.ident of Ireland