The statistics issued by the National Youth Council last week makes for stark reading.
I discussed this with an older person who said it reminded him of the early 1980s when young people had no choice but to leave the country to find work.
However there are differences between then and now. The now infamous statement by Charlie Haughey in 1980 that the country was economically bust was delivered in a “state of the nation” address which at least told people what they already knew: that we were in for a very difficult decade.
The difference now is that we have a political establishment who seem to be completely in denial of the disastrous state that they are leaving for the next generation.
In the 1980s many politicians in fairness hung their collective heads in shame at the spectre of mass emigration and promised they were working hard to turn things around.
Today the political class seem completely removed from the concerns of young people and prefer to pretend they are players in international political issues like Gaza, Ukraine and Iran
This is merely distraction politics tilting at windmills like the fictional Don Quixote.
The real duty of the political class is to pass on to the next generation a country that they can be proud to inherit and live in
In many ways our young people are facing problems and dilemmas that didn’t exist in the 1980s.
One such example is student accommodation. Recently the president of University College Cork asked landlords to cut the price of accommodation as students can’t afford it. He highlighted that a number of properties within walking distance of the University have a 40% vacancy rates because students can’t afford the asking price.
Many students today have to commute long distances as they simply can’t afford accommodation. In the 1980s, this would have been unheard of as there was more than enough accommodation for all budgets.
Of course, many were small dingy bedsits and the like but they served their purposes.
A generation of students, civil servants, teachers and gardaí started their working lives in such cheap accommodation and progressed up the property ladder from there.
Today a combination of banning bedsits in 2013 and driving small scale landlords out of the market has left us in the sorry state of young students sleeping in cars or a pal’s sofa.
Similarly, a survey by Agriland and the CPSMA recently makes grim reading for the future of young farmers.
1 in 3 farmers intend to leave farming in the next 5 years. Who will grow our food?
Our political class who showed up smiling for photo ops at the recent Ploughing Championship don’t seem to be concerned at all. With the spectre of Mersosur and perhaps other similar deals hovering in the background it is understandable why young people in farming should feel despondent about the future.
In a recent interview Taoiseach Micheal Martin counted the smoking ban in 2004 as among his proudest achievements. While he and his political generation may have saved us from the dangers of passive smoking, it’s a pity they haven’t left a more meaningless legacy for our young people.