‘Best Place to Be’, the recent RTÉ 1 television series presented by Baz Ashmawy (RTÉ Player) had an interesting subplot running through its programmes.
Ostensibly about Irish people making a new life for themselves in various countries in Europe, the series also reflected on some of the reasons why many of these same people decided to up and leave Ireland.
Indeed, if the programme budget had stretched to include Australia you get the feeling that much the same message would also emerge about Irish people there.
One recurring theme in the series was ‘the conversation’ about what prompted people to move. Alongside the usual wish to experience a different country and culture there was also the persistent theme about how difficult it was to actually find a place to live in Ireland. Not surprisingly, the prospect of living upstairs in the box room in your twenties and thirties has been a major driver in the lives of Generation Z and their Millennial siblings.
In this way, one participant spoke about paying €560 to rent a room in a house share in Cork now paying €900 to rent an entire apartment in Turin in northern Italy. Another spoke about paying €850 for an apartment for one in Berlin. There were similar stories about the cost of childcare and a host of other things.
There was also the sense that Irish people who work hard for moderate wages are penalised at every turn for their efforts by the Irish State. Ireland, the so-called progressive and inclusive economic miracle, it would seem, expends more of its political capital in cherishing prized characteristics associated with progressive ideology than it does in looking after the ordinary Davids and Niamhs who get up for work every day.
It’s hardly surprising that Gen Z is angry. Not only do many of them look unlikely to ever live independently outside the homes in which they grew up in, all the signs are that they will also end up substantially poorer than their parents.
Neither does the area of pension provision look good for them – not alone are they more likely than their parents to be in precarious employment but added to that, there’s a bigger demographic issue looming related to a falling birth rate.
It’s certainly not for the want of hard work on the part of Gen Z. This generation has invested massively in education and third level education in particular. While their parents’ generation were settling in to work and starting to consider things like marriage and buying a house at twenty one, Gen Z is usually still only in the process of completing their first under graduate degree at that same age.
Indeed, one of the features of life for Gen Z is the near god-like status of third level education. This means that the undergraduate degree is now usually followed by the near-mandatory ‘masters’ degree. Many will now complete not one but several ‘masters’ before they ever get to hold down a full-time job. Emerging in to the jobs market in their mid-twenties, many will find that they are earning not a whole lot above the minimum wage.
One of the most insidious developments in recent times has been in the area of qualification inflation. The problem today is that, in terms of getting a job, a master’s degree is now probably worth what a primary degree was ten years ago. Twenty years previously the Leaving Cert would have unlocked the same type of job and thirty years before that, the Junior Cert or Inter Cert would have done much the same for you.
No-one is saying that education and particularly tertiary education does not have benefits but we also need to be realistic and recognise that many of the courses being offered at third level now benefit the institutions running them more than those paying to do them. In a word, third level education has become an industry in its own rite and the students and their paying parents are not always the main beneficiaries of that industry.
However, anger at their own parents’ generation for the situation in which they find themselves is surely misplaced. Their parents are also on a new generational journey pouring thousands of their savings into educational courses which do not always lead to a job.
They also end up housing and feeding their adult children into their twenties and thirties. If their adult children ever do manage to buy a house it is frequently with the help of the bank of mam and dad that they do so.
Neither is being angry with Ireland a reasonable response. Countries, on their own, do not produce things like unaffordable rents, precarious employment or the abiding sense that ability and hard work are punished at every turn.
That is the result of the particular political culture of a country. In the case of Ireland, the political culture since the 1990’s has been centre left on economic matters and liberal on social matters.
This is the political culture that has shaped the lives of Gen Z over the last 25 years as formerly conservative and right-leaning parties like Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have basically crossed the political spectrum and become versions of the Labour Party.
The thing about today’s Ireland is that, while it has evidently been a disaster for many, it has been very good for some people. Take Ireland’s socialist grandees – not only have they the satisfaction of seeing the country adopting without question their ideology but they are also the ones who have ended up with the six figure salaries as NGO heads or the gold-plated presidential pensions that are a multiple of the average industrial wage.
For Gen Z, talk about things like ‘choice’ and ‘equality’ seems particularly cruel given their situation in life and the fact that many of them look destined to spend their twenties and thirties living in the box room upstairs. Maybe, for Generation Z, it really is time for change after all.