President Higgins' last big push to hear the voice of the diaspora - Seeking a new vision of Ireland

Ireland's President Michael D Higgins wants to hear from the Diaspora

The President’s landmark series of Young & Irish seminars may nearly be at an end (the final seminar takes place this weekend in Galway) but there is still a chance for young Irish people abroad to have their say on the burning issues affecting them, with the deadline for submissions to The President being the 29^th September. In fact, that’s why the seminars are so-called.

Speaking to a small group of reporters (of which I was one) on Saturday in Monaghan, President Higgins revealed that originally the title of the series was Young in Ireland, but was amended to facilitate the great throngs of young people who have since left the country and to make sure they were not forgotten. Higgins takes his role as President of all the people of Ireland very seriously and is confident that the emigration of now is not the same as that of the 50’s or 80’s, due in no small part to the advances in technology. He said that Ireland’s young people abroad, no matter how let down by the country they’ve felt, are determined not to turn their back on the country and noted that submissions to him both foreign and domestic were very similar in tone and scope. No matter where they were, young Irish people’s hopes and dreams for the country were one and the same.

One thing that has been remarkable about the seminars so far is the way in which the young people attending have responded to the President, and how he responded to them. During the day he said that no young person wanted anything at the expense of anyone else, they just wanted a better Ireland. In a world where young people are often portrayed as selfish, wanton and inert, it goes a very long way to hear someone in authority say that as clearly as President Higgins. Young people respond to him because of the clear respect he shows them, and his want and need to go to bat for young people is clear.

And ultimately, that is what we all, not just young people need: someone to go to bat for us. To fight our corner. To be an assuring force in a very uncertain world. The scope of the Being Young & Irish seminars is very wide and everything from education and innovation to tourism, sport and national pride have been mentioned in the discussions, and they’re vitally important things. But, the world could be instantly made better with two things taken into consideration: that your opinions and aspirations as a citizen no matter your status matters, and that the hard work and effort you do to express them and make it real is appreciated. President Higgins knows this, and lives this.

All over the world, young people from Ireland are currently living and working, trying to make their way in the world, but not giving up hope on the country from whence they came. If you’re one of those young people, The President wants to hear from you, and though your vision for Ireland might be several years down the road, Michael D Higgins wants to travel it with you. 

You can submit your vision of Ireland to the President by the 29th September at http://www.president.ie/makeasubmission/

Being Young And Irish - what are Ireland's young people saying about their country?

Michael D Higgins and Ireland's Youth at the Being Young & Irish launch

This weekend is going to be an eventful one for me. Not only are my home country of Donegal playing in their first All-Ireland since before I received my first holy communion, but it's also the northern leg of President Higgins' series of Being Young & Irish seminars, with Monaghan following on from Dublin and Cork. So what have been young people's priorities so far?

On a daily basis the Being Young & Irish Facebook page post submissions made by young people all over the country and they range from impassioned ideas on how to improve mental health awareness and facility, equality and preserving cultural identity, but on both seminar days so far some large themes came to the fore.

One of the striking areas where ideas and interest was high was in education, where there was a near unanimous wish for wholesale reform of the educational system. Specifically, young people wish to see a change to the stultifying status quo, especially at secondary school level, with a more holistic approach that would integrate life skills, creativity, debates and innovation, as well as taking a fundamental look at how subjects are taught, what is covered on the curriculum and a focus on political education. It's clear based on the reactions of the young people that they see changing the fundamentals of education, by altering they very way we interact with the education system, it is from there that further new ideas and innovations can come in other facets of life.

The second, very encouraging element was the willingness of the young people not just to passively postulate on the issues of the day, but to take active ownership of them. In Dublin, the young people succinctly proposed a "Get Up Off Your Arse Day" and the Cork meeting also emphasised a push towards volunteering and putting plans into actions by strengthening the bonds in their community.

Related to that was the need for young people to challenge and refute stereotypes that dog them, especially in the media, and the best way to do is to make clear how willing they are to contribute, both locally and nationally. To that end there were calls for a national youth panel, to consult on affairs of state that substantially affected young people, and the more general call for accountability between the state's citizens and its' government was a very popular one.

Even though the Being Young and Irish consultation process is only half way through, there's still time to add something to the discussion. If you think have something valuable to contribute to the conversation about Ireland's future, share it with us at www.president.ie/makeasubmission. You never know where it might lead.

Being Young And Irish - taking care of the Irish Diaspora around the world

Irish students protest forced immigration at the Famine memorial Dublin

As I write this, I’m just in the door from the Donegal Youth Council’s end of term celebration evening. For the past two years three dozen young people aged between 13 and 18 have given up large swathes of their time to use their electoral mandate to serve others in a dazzling array of ways, from improving local facilities to shaping national policy. But even without their substantive list of legislative achievements, the Donegal Youth Council and the extraordinary young people who make it what it is embody a civic pride and duty and willingness to discuss and take on issues without fear or rancor. These are the qualities which will be the building blocks of the new Ireland. And yet, Ireland is currently squandering this talent as it loses fantastic young people like this all the time to emigration.  

A cursory look at my list of Facebook friends alone makes for stark viewing. Scores of people I know from home or college or generally being around have in the last few years changed their location header to London, Edinburgh, Cardiff, Brussels, Chicago, New York, Buenos Aires, Dubai, Tokyo, Bangkok, Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney and Auckland. It’s bad enough that they had to go to find work abroad in the first place, but worse still is the attitude our national governments have taken to an ever-burgeoning diaspora, which has ranged from passive indifference to apparent relief of using the emigration “release valve”.

It’s not that working on another continent is an inherently tragic thing; it is of course enriching in a whole host of ways, but as with most things compulsion rather takes the edge off. Fundamentally the reason so many young people are leaving our shores is because they don’t feel their talent is appreciated or facilitated, and that gulf only widens with time and geography. If Ireland is ever to get back on its feet, it needs to get serious about integrating the diaspora and keeping them involved in the affairs of state.

Plenty of other nations do it. In the US absentee ballots from international locations are a normal part of the electoral process. Italy and France for example have representatives of their ex-pats in parliament too. And yet, despite perhaps the single most extensive ethnic connection network in the world, Ireland doesn’t extend the same rights, responsibilities or entitlements. That needs to change.

Granted, there is some opposition to such measures within Ireland itself, with suggestions that by leaving the country you just forfeit your right to vote here. But this is a globalized world, and the decisions made here matter a great deal everywhere else. Our diaspora have an incredible amount to offer us and we could do with utilizing and being thankful for the skill and wisdom. Émigrés know this all too well.

The word “shareholder” has quite negative connotations at the minute, but in a national sense it’s vital for Ireland’s future that we give our citizens living abroad a sense of belonging and value they probably didn’t feel while here, and which factored in their decision to leave in the first place. If Ireland can’t provide reasons for young people not to go, it should at least give them some not to stay away.

I sat yesterday evening beaming with pride at the Donegal’s Youth Council’s Celebration Evening. Not just for their achievements, but for the love and self-worth and common purpose they provided each other with by serving the public and bettering their community. As a nation, we need to do so much more of that. No matter where our citizens go, it’s vital their promise isn’t squandered or their civic pride quashed. The Proclamation urges us to cherish all the children of the nation equally, it shouldn’t have a distance limiter. 

Being Young and Irish - Our disappointed generation should learn from past mistakes and make Irish education something to be proud of

During tough times in Ireland education is key

Being a young Irish person is hardly something that lends itself well to a one size fits all definition. But there is one unifier this generation does have in common: a collective sense that things aren’t quite going as well as we’d hope.

For young people in their twenties, there’s an overriding sense that the life we’re living wasn’t in the script. When people of my age went to college just as the century turned, Ireland was reveling in a Gilded Age where it seemed opportunity and prospects and hope were going to be plentiful for ever more. Emigration was something you saw referenced on Reeling In The Years, and foreign travel didn’t have the specter of necessity about it. For those in their teens they face a situation where, through no fault of their own, their chance of enduring employment at home after third level education is starkly diminished. That is assuming they’re able to afford third level education in the first place.

It’s not that young people want or feel entitled to instant success, far from it. Success is something you should work hard and strive for, but it should feel within reach eventually. It should be difficult to get your big break, it shouldn’t be impenetrable. Chasing dead ends and living with disappointment is just part of everyday life for this generation.

But even despite our current difficulties, resilience and positivity will always shine through. For President Higgins’ upcoming Being Young & Irish seminar young people are making suggestions on how to make Ireland’s future better, on a wide range of topics. For me, with such challenges for young people finding their way in the world, and the best way to use their skills, my main priority is education.

If Ireland is to advance in the future, it needs to seriously overhaul what we teach and how it’s taught. 100 years since Pearse blasted the murder machine, it’s still fully functioning. The Leaving Cert, the results of which had thousands of students nationwide up to high dough this week, is a pathetically inefficient method of measuring achievement, value or talent. In a world of high speed bullet trains, the Leaving Cert is a pony and trap. But mild-mannered reform of the Leaving Cert won’t be worth a hill of beans unless the lead up to it is also drastically overhauled.

In my experience, every ten year old I’ve ever known has possessed an encyclopaedic knowledge of something. Sometimes it’s football, music, a particular TV show or film or something more academic like history or geography or dinosaurs, but I’ve never met a 10 year old who can’t rattle off knowledge about their interests at the drop of a hat. By secondary school, that instinct to learn what interests you is blunted. In focusing such rigor on exam preparation, the whole education system funnels people into a format which seriously undermines creativity, independent thinking, open discussion and deeper exploration. Knowledge, such as it is, is crammed into the short stay car park of our minds for the purpose of splurging it on as many pages as you can as quickly as you can. You literally have no time to think, and there’s our problem.

Now more than ever, Ireland needs people of skill, talent and imagination to speak up and share the ideas that will shape and influence the way we think, act and work well into the future. We owe it to ourselves and to generations ahead to build an education system that helps encourage that, and all the incredible things borne of such a system. Ours is a generation that faces disappointment regularly, but we have to use that disappointment to strive to do better for ourselves and the young people that come after us. Ireland needs to learn from it’s mistakes, and then become a better teacher.

Support rallies for Sean Quinn is everything that's wrong with Ireland -- we're addicted to local sugar daddies

Sean Quinn

There are many things in Ireland that are popular that I can’t quite get. The government’s insistence on selling off our natural resources to highest bidder, for example. The Saw Doctors. Ray Foley.

But the thing I don’t understand the most also seems to be our biggest problem: the inability to divorce a positive personal interaction with a powerful bigwig, and the egregious wrongdoing they’ve committed.

We’ve seen it with Charles Haughey. For years and years and years his fabulous wealth and the origins thereof was all but an open secret, and yet he was Taoiseach over the course of four parliaments and had the most hysterically loyal following in Christendom.

We’ve seen it with Bertie too, when everyone knew full well he was a devious little gurrier, but sure wasn’t he just an ordinary man who liked a pint and a football match, loved his mammy and got his ashes at the start of Lent?

We’ve seen it with Lowry, who in spite of resigning from the cabinet and his party due to the overwhelming smell of rat, has topped the poll in Tipp North for fifteen straight years, and will only be displaced when his head is chopped off in a sword-fight at the top of a mountain.

And now, we’re seeing it with Sean Quinn. Last week, thousands turned up to a rally in Cavan in support of their friendly neighborhood beleaguered ex-billionaire. Several respected luminaries were in attendance, among them Fr Brian D’Arcy and Tyrone manager Mickey Harte, and a letter was read out from that known paragon of virtue, Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary. The great local conglomerato himself was there too, he even gave an emotional speech to his adoring public, Irish Citizen Kane style. Throughout the rally people paid tribute to his generosity, loyalty, decency and the fact he provided employment for a troubled, deprived area, and he’s been given an awful unfair hard time of it. Paying tribute to someone is perfectly fair and fine, but everyone seemed to be willfully blind as to why he’s in trouble in the first place.

He put a monster bet on Anglo Irish Bank shares that would have seen his fortune go stratospheric, but it didn’t and instead lost billions. To give the whole thing a metaphysical, Alice in Wonderland feel, the money he used to amass a 25% stake in Anglo was borrowed from, eh, Anglo. Worse yet, he borrowed another half a billion to buy some property to use as security. To compound matters, the company siphoned off funds from the profitable sectors of his business to keep the struggling ones up, and played an extended global game of Hide The Assets with the Irish courts, which is what landed his son in prison, made his nephew a fugitive and makes Quinn’s freedom shaky at best.

So in other words, an uber-capitalist takes a massive gamble and loses, to the extent that everyone with an insurance policy in Ireland has to pay an extra 2% because of it, broke the law explicitly and engaged in a flagrantly obstructive and obtuse game of chicken with the courts. But sure, isn’t he a decent fella?

Sean Quinn is merely the latest exhibit to prove that Ireland will never be a country free of corruption, gombeenism or a near-feudal loyalty to parochial heroes. We simply love our blameless, imperious regional sugar daddies too much. People in Cavan and Fermanagh decry the Anglo swine who ruined the country and why aren’t they being put through the ringer, though they’re perfectly blasé about the fact that, at a 25% stake in the company, Sean Quinn *was* Anglo. They hold asinine placards like “Bring back Quinn and let him create jobs”, apparently unaware of the connection between his actions and those like him and the state of the economy that makes expenditure cuts and layoffs the order of the day. Sean Quinn’s net contribution to Irish society at this point is firmly in the red, and it’s an absurd case of mental reservation or blind, bewildering, unwarranted loyalty to say otherwise. But, loads of people are, and why? Because he’s local, and a good honest man he is too. 

How the IMF are killing the Irish patient -- more austerity cuts are the wrong diagnosis for ailing Irish economy

IMF fail to fix what ails Ireland

When I was about ten, I was diagnosed with asthma. I was given an inhaler, one of those tubes you have to blow into to measure your lung capacity, and an amount of information and fact sheets along the lines of “So, you’ve become dust’s bitch” that would have stunned an ox. There was just one problem: I wasn’t asthmatic.

After the initial diagnosis my health was getting worse if anything, and every time my mother and I protested as much, I was fussed around by confused doctors like I was The Six Million Dollar Technology: “We can rebuild him, we have the technology...we just have to give him more asthma stuff.” Eventually we just decided to unilaterally stop using the inhaler, the lung capacity thingamajig and everything else, and sure enough, I got better.

Turns out I had just a standard level of childhood sickness for a kid with glasses as thick as mine, but after I was diagnosed something weird started happening. Loads of children who I knew from school also started being diagnosed with asthma. Like, loads of them. It seemed if you had a cough, splutter, took a drink and a bit went down the wrong way or got a bruise in the shin, asthma was probably the problem. People started to wonder what the hell was going on.

Why am I telling you all this? Because it feels like some of those childhood diagnosticians have given up medicine for economics, and ditched their MDs in favor of the IMF. Recently it was announced that the International Monetary Fund, Ireland’s economic proctologist, wanted more cuts to social welfare payments, child benefit, raising a property tax and, their most bristly resolution, removing the automatic right for old age pensioners to have a medical card.

The IMF was set up after World War 2 with the intention to help and invest in countries in perilous economic situations. In more recent times, it has become the ultimate arbiter of asymmetric free market policy, the adherents of which believe they are the only show in town. So, when the IMF detail countries to make such structural changes, they do it not entirely out of sheer bean counting necessity, but ideological prerogative and zeal. Ireland is sick alright, but asthma medicine isn’t going to make us better.

What Ireland has needed for years and needs now more than ever is wise investment made in the right areas. The free market notion that if you throw enough money at it things will cascade into their natural positions is simply not viable or practical. Every decision made at government level effects many others and all a cut in the dole payments will do is make it harder for people to live rather than easier for people get a decent job, because the investment simply isn’t there. A wiser use of the government’s time and money would be to make the social welfare system more comprehensible. As it stands, if I was on the dole but got a couple of weeks of stand-alone, temporary work, I wouldn’t have my money deducted for the few weeks, as would be the rational thing to do. Instead, you have to sign off, and then undergo the whole desperate rigmarole again when you’re done as if you’ve never been in the office before. It’s a small example but one that exemplifies the wider logic gaps and inefficiencies of that department, and the government as a whole.

To paraphrase the Hippocratic oath, “first do no harm”. But, in even given the IMF’s best intentions, their fundamental wrong-headedness in dealing with economic crisis is doing just that. Cuts, hikes and universal entitlement revocations is the wrong medicine for the wrong symptoms, at the wrong place at the wrong time. I truly hope the IMF will realize that flinging an inhaler at us will not solve all our ills, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. 

Ireland's unemployment crisis - job bridge scheme and the future

Dole queue in north Dublin

Ireland’s recent chastened economic woe has not only hit pockets and confidence, but also language and action. More and more, people aren’t so much “working” as “keeping busy.”

In my parents’ time, there were certain jobs available to people (the civil service, the bank, the farm, teaching or nursing) and most of them were long-term, secure and pensionable. The world we live and attempt to work in is now unrecognizable.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not yearning for the fadó fadó days of narrow vocationalism by any stretch. It’s a marvelous thing to have not only a greater choice of jobs but better knowledge transfer and employment mobility, but as is often the case with Ireland we have oscillated from one extreme to the other with no concern for balance.

Currently, we have all the insecurity and uncertainty of mobile employment without the range or variety of jobs to make it work. Therefore, we have a host of young people struggling to find any job in any market, not least the one for which they’re qualified, and often multi-qualified.

With so much demand and so little supply, hiring practices have taken on a moral dimension. More and more young people trying to advance their careers are having to do more for less. With employers holding the cards and graduates desperate for experience, remuneration often amounts to “a lovely time and a good reference.”

The lines between serving your time and being outright exploited are being horribly blurred.

Instead of the pillars of employment of old we now have Job Bridge, a catastrophic attempt at a work scheme that has rightly drawn snorts of derision for being laden with jobs either too ridiculous (waitressing and cleaning) or too advanced in their requirements (a whole host of the media ones) to warrant a (much too long) nine month stretch of an “internship” for the princely price of the dole and a little bonus sprinkled on top. It’s not how they do things in Holland.

While I was in Brussels at the EU Open Days event, I attended a seminar that showcased the Dutch policy for tackling youth unemployment. Some of the proposals were a bit out there, and it’s far from a perfect system either, but on the whole their approach was multi-faceted, well coordinated and well targeted.

Amazingly, it’s illegal to leave Dutch school at 18 without a qualification of some kind, and people younger than 27 have to comply by the rather rigorous rules or they don’t receive dole at all. The flipside is there is a large structure in place to avoid that happening. The job fair circuit is an industry all of itself, along with a multitude of other initiatives such as work coaches, youth covenants and subsidies and premiums for business owners who co-operate actively in the process, as well as a robust internship and training sector. As a result, their unemployment rate among young people is half that in the BMW region (borders, midlands, west) of Ireland. The Dutch themselves sum up their plan thusly: partnership, personnel, political prudence and pressure. The Irish plan brings to mind another word that stars with “P”.

While in Brussels I also talked to Connie Hanniffy, a county councilor from Offaly and senior member of the Irish delegation on the Committee of the Regions, being appointed to the continental committee by three different leaders of Fine Gael and with a particular interest in enterprise, business and employment. She claimed that we not only have to concentrate on more funding for skills and jobs, but we have to concentrate attention on who gets that funding.

“We’re missing the very people we need to get at” claimed Hanniffy. “We need to be getting to people with traditions of unemployment in their family and their community and provide schemes for those that haven’t had the direction. We need to engage with many people on a partnership basis.”

She also pointed to the role EU funding can have in job creation and re-skilling, pointing to the globalisation fund for erstwhile construction workers and funding for people wishing to start up their own business and mentoring. “You can’t subsidise your way into business but a structure is needed for business to survive. They may have good ideas but they may need help getting access to markets. Businesses need to interlink and find new ways of doing things.”

On the more general question of the job market and the sort of jobs people do and the way they do them, Hanniffy pointed to the fantastic example she saw in Berlin, where more and more jobs were coming from the burgeoning creative sector. She also saw an important role for educational facilities. “It’s up to colleges and universities not to try and pack courses, to provide balance and offer different boxes. I think this is what has been wrong in the past”.

Of all the things Ireland is currently short on, talent is not one of them. And any future prosperity the country has will be determined by how serious government, business and all other interested stakeholders take the job of building a structure where that talent is valued and put to best use.