A new Ireland: What do young people want?

I was asked to give my thoughts, as an activist and as a young woman, to the Humanist Association of Ireland (HAI) Summer school on what it is that young people want in a 'New Ireland' . That's a difficult one to answer succinctly, but I gave it a shot in these remarks.

Remarks to the Humanist Association of Ireland (HAI) Summer School, 8 September 2019

On Wednesday just past, I sat down with a journalist in my 83 year old granny’s sitting room. In the interview, we were being asked about cross-generational social change in Ireland over the last decade in particular, and whether that had a direct correlation with the decline in the Catholic Church.

When granny was asked why she still goes to mass every day, she said “it’s something to do and gets me up in the morning.” She said she meets her friends for coffee afterwards and when asked, couldn’t remember the content of any recent sermons. 

She reckons many people went into the nuns because the women may have been ‘that way inclined’ to other women at the time, and because they were good, decent people who wanted to help. She says most went into the priesthood for ‘the education’, and posited that in order to survive, the church is going to have to start training female priests. In my head as a child, her faith seemed a lot more devout to the scriptures and teachings of that religion than this conversation would now suggest.

However she talked, solemnly, about a time in the past when a friend of hers in desperation and exasperation, went to a priest in their home place of rural Leitrim for advice because her husband insisted on more children, but the woman felt her body wasn’t able. She felt that if they continued having children, she would have nothing to feed them but “the grass outside” ....in her words. The priest’s response? That she "should go home and perform (her) wifely duties”. That actually happened and I doubt it was unique.

Yet, Granny still goes to mass, regularly despite this. She separates such instances from the routine and the structure it provides to her life. For her it’s a social occasion, a community interaction. It no longer governs how she thinks, and she’s not alone in that, and will acknowledge that openly like many others, even if perhaps she won't admit, or ever know, how much it may have directed her actions in the past.

Granny was one of the first people I came out to as gay ("I won't be bringing home any lads from America gran"), and voted yes in both recent referenda. This may not make her a radical. I love her, but in ways, by voting the way she did, she was undoing votes I believe she had made the other way previously, like thousands of others - and that’s just it, she could change her mind over time, built on the experience of the Ireland she has lived in, and what she has seen happen in it.

Acceptance and belonging

Much of what needed to happen, in her case of 'mind-changing', was the understanding that you didn’t have to do a thing yourself for it to be something that should be acceptable in the society you now live in, with space provided for it.

This notion of 'acceptable' and 'acceptance' have given me much to consider. Being ‘accepted’ is something very very few of us will openly admit to wanting, but the need for belonging is very much ingrained in our make-up even if we don't talk about it, it drives our behaviour and much of our attitudes.

And so I’ve considered, that one of the core tenets of what young people want, what everyone wants, I think, including me, is acceptance and to belong - even when we've conflicting emotions about that.

Not the kind acceptance that means we’re all the same as each other, but actually the kind that recognises that as individuals we are all on our own paths and we should be supported to strike out on our own and challenge where we’ve come from and even change it.

‘Acceptance’ for being gay, for instance, was something I craved for a long time before I felt like I was strong enough to ask for it, because of the overwhelming idea that it wasn’t something I deserved because of who I was, and what she (my granny) believed; what society believed. The affect this struggle for self and wider acceptance had on me was so dark, and so miserable at the time that I rarely go back to think about it.

So that elusive notion of belonging doesn’t just come with things like representation of women in media, or equal treatment at work, or your county flag in Croke park (a feat which, to be fair, would be a long time coming for where I’m from in Longford, bless the lads) but to feel belonging is also to recognise that the society in which you live needs to start meeting your needs and expectations for you to feel really part of it, and that that often means unearthing much of what has gone before for something that needs to be rethought out or challenged....all of which doesn’t mean you hate Ireland. What I'm saying is, that the drive for belonging can mean we make a place change and be better so that it's good enough to accept us for who we are.

That was what both recent referenda allowed space for, more than anything I think.

Fundamentally, I don’t believe I should have had to ask anyone for the right to marry, or go door to door to door in my home county having conversations about wombs and childbirth and HSE consent policies and rape and incest and what a shame it was to get healthcare in England (of all places) - in order to feel 'belonging' here. 

But if I’m being honest, whether I like it or not, the opportunity of constitutional change, the symbolism of a defeat to way over-represented hardline christian think-tanks, and the public conversation and mobilisation of young people that came with both referenda has sown fresh seeds and watered others when they were parched for a new Ireland - one that I would actually choose to live in, one that I could be happy in.

The belief in people

When the journalist, sitting on my granny’s settee, turned to me and asked me the same question, about what It was that I believed in, I said that I believe in people, and more than anything I believe in my generation of young people because I have seen them do great things. I admit that belief is regularly questioned and...shooketh, but I have a visceral sense that we are stewards of this earth and I think we need to do much, much better for each other and for the land that we’re lucky enough to have populated. 

I do think social change has come about in recent years in small part to do with the decline of the Catholic church, and it only has itself to blame. But for that assumption is almost like the chicken and the egg, and to suggest that it was the only reason for change would be an affront to my own personal activism and that of thousands of others. We did it because we felt alien from this country and I think we did it so we could finally belong.

So in this New Ireland: What do young people want?

Do you know what, I’ll tell you what you what we want. And brace yourselves, because what I’m about to say is extremely radical, and may shake you to the core of your foundations as freethinkers, philosophers, writers, humanists and adults.

Young people, in a better Ireland, want:

1. Affordable Housing
2. Access to high quality Education
3. Fair and decent working conditions
4. An actually representative Oireachtas
5. A planet that’s not dying
6. ...and sex. Lot’s of consensual, safe, positive sex.

And in all of that, you’ll see I’m sure, that young people don’t necessarily want something so entirely different to what you want. The difference, is that we have to live through the decisions that were made for us - without us.

But we’re demanding a change to that now, we’re not waiting ‘our turn’. Like we are toteing our keepcups and tote bags and striking about the planet in protests led by secondary school youth - because most people before us didn’t think protecting the rainforest or not burning up every inch of fossil fuels to hand should be a priority. 

And of course the above list of demands may appear reductive and it is, because of course young people aren’t a homogenous group or a single voting block and I also don’t speak and wouldn’t claim to speak for everyone my age and younger, but I also know that they registered in their thousands in order to have a chance to vote in the last two referenda because I was there doing it with them. I felt the energy. 

I experienced first hand the drive for a new Ireland that we knew could exist. One, yes, where people can change their minds and "go on journeys" to political realisations when confronted with more information.

A new Ireland where we would stop shrugging off the past instead of putting a spotlight on it and pointing out what was actually wrong and talking about it and making reparations so that we could move on and do better but not forget, never forget. 

A better Ireland, not because it is inevitable that time means progress, but because we need to and we deserve it.

If we take into account remarks from this summer school’s very first speaker, Paul Rowe from Educate Together, it is not just in the education system itself that young people have grown up in a changed and changing Ireland, and in turn demanded change while we were at it. The idea that Ireland might transition significantly from decade to decade or generation to generation is by no means a unique observation, but if we think that somehow we stand still now because we’ve asked for just enough, we will do our country, and our Island, a massive disservice. It would also make me ask, what the hell would it all have been for if we pressed pause now? 

Young people now, live public lives online what would have been seen previously unfathomable, lives that despite seeming more shared, are regularly more lonely and dark and exposed because of the sharing itself. Bare in mind that there are children born in the last few years whose lives will be played out and captured almost entirely digitally - instead of pulling out dusty photo albums for boyfriends in years to come, Irish mammies will be scrolling through memes and shared videos of cute animals to find embarrassing toddler content for that special someone being brought ‘home’ for the first time. 

What does all this mean? It means that we’re switched on as a generation, and that does not get flipped back, and probably can’t be. And instead of mulling over the tragedy of it, we need to be preparing for what that means for our society.

There are no absolutes here of course. Not every single young person is mobilising and agitating, but most of us know it will be next to impossible to ever buy a house on the average industrial wage and there is a creep of bitterness and rejection in that fact that will leave for a disaffected generation before we blink.

And if you’re wondering why you’re not seeing people in their late thirties in particular taking over the streets visibly demanding this change, it’s because they’re attempting to just keep their heads above water, or because they’re not coming back from Australia. We make light of the ‘avocado eating’ of millenials as if somehow its the brunches that have gotten us into the state we're in.

Other key issues facing our young people

1. Access to higher education for disadvantaged and marginalised groups, where after Brexit, at €3,000 we will have the highest fees for third level in the EU, while investment in that sector has dropped dramatically since recession and never recovered. The number of current students from the travelling community is still in single digits. Your postcode is an accurate indication of your trajectory. And don't get me started on grants. Grants don’t even nearly cover the cost, we heard from Penny dinners only yesterday what that can mean in reality.
2. The genuine equality of opportunity, social and economic, for Mná na hEireann (without pandering. Without being told to calm ourselves. Without being made feel like we’re “whinging” or making work for everyone else). This means that I won’t any time soon be shutting up about ‘women’s issues’ or gender equality, parity and the need to expand what we understand by gendered roles and norms in the first instance, and challenge the notion of gender as some binary dictator for our paths in life in the first instance.
3. Access to accommodation and affordable housing as we battle a spiralling housing crisis: On the night of the census in 2016, there were 429 homeless students in Ireland. This made up over 8% of the total homeless numbers. There are people this week starting in college attempting to muster up €290 per week for accommodation. There are young people staying in digs for mad money who have one shelf in the kitchen, and have to entirely evacuate with their belongings every single Friday of term. There are young people who can’t afford to pursue the thing they love most because Dublin and other urban centres have shut them out.

The demands

• Sexual consent education (doing better than hauling in CURA or the likes to tell us that we’re loved no matter what but don’t you dare think about a baby outside marriage). Sexual consent needs to be embedded in our education system, instead of us all being tied to this notion, somehow, that just because you talk about sex young people will suddenly do it. Well, in a shock move, they were going to explore their sexuality anyway, but they've instead been doing it without education, guidance on being safe, or support in terms of what respect and self-love even looks like.
• Mental health supports that recognise the record anxiety and depression levels facing people between 18-24, and the male suicide rates which are devastating families and communities;

A future for a planet that we are unlikely to survive without, and quite frankly we’re embarrassed and ashamed that we’ve been put in the position of somehow 'saving it' by people who were here before us., as if it’s some exciting hollywood-style mission instead the actual end to the icebergs.

• And think for a second about the hundreds of people still living in Direct Provision within this state. In limbo. Lives lived behind walls too far from shops or schools or pharmacies. Out of sight, away from us. For us to be silent and not to act on this. To be annoyed and tell people that we are, is to be complicit. It is to shirk our basic human responsibility to others. That's not a new Ireland.

Social Change

To conclude this significant rant of mine, let's consider that social change doesn’t happen by itself, or because it’s time naturally comes, or because of goodwill, or because "the young people will do it".

Social change happens not just on the streets but by cross-generational dialogue that works together to demand it and convince each other, and the naysayers, of it's importance to our very survival, as well as in the name of basic human dignity, and it rarely happens in the same way twice.

We #MadeGraTheLaw in 2015, We #MadeMnaTheLaw in 2018. And we should applaud ourselves for being part of that and making it happen. But it was only the beginning of the attempts to make things that are wrong, right.

We can’t think the process of ticking off boxes will continue, because there's a push back happening from people who are 'comfortable' now - who are saying 'this far' (abortion and the gays) and no further. That's enough. Calm down.

But things like climate change are going to need action beyond coffee in reusable mugs. New immigrants, as part of our society, will need more than ‘intercultural’ days in our schools to feel welcome and accepted. Ireland won’t look the same as it did and it shouldn’t, because we’re not in a scene from The Quiet Man, and we never were in the first place. The next stage of change will unsettle the things we considered unique to Irish identity, and the consequences of Brexit will rattle us more than anyone wants to talk about. 

I was asked to consider what I thought, and what it is in my experience that young people want in a new Ireland, a secular Ireland, as it were, post referenda on same sex marriage and reproductive rights. It's to keep moving, and to move a bit faster on the things that matter.