Why children will look back and smile

PRESENT TENSE:IF YOU WERE eight years old you might have looked around at this country recently, at the new landscape, at the way things have changed so much so quickly, and you might think, This is the best week there has ever been.

For much of the country – the grown-ups, basically – this has been the most humiliating and miserable month in the country’s existence since the foundation of the State. But if you’re a kid? It must have been a blast: getting up every morning to hear that school has been cancelled; spending days making snowballs, throwing snowballs, making more snowballs. Watching thick, freezing feathers of fun falling from the sky and knowing that it is pouring happiness into your life. Meanwhile the adults are distracted by something boring on the telly: a man in a suit talking about money to other people in suits.

There may be a disconnect between how some will remember 2010 in the future. It has happened before. Nineteen eighty-two, for example, was a year of two general elections, carnage in the North, Gubu – grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented happenings – and marches against tax rates. But if you ask people in their late 30s what they remember from that year, many will say a great World Cup and the most magnificent snowfall of their lives. For their parents it was a tough time. For the kids it imprinted some of their most golden memories.

Why drag this crisis into whimsy? Because understandable concern has been expressed of late about the futures of our children, as individuals and as a generation. And there is a sense from today’s adults of having let down the children we will eventually hand the country over to and of crippling them with debts we notched up. But it raises a question: how will the children of today grow to view their predecessors?

In the US they have labels for more generations than seems possible: the Greatest Generation, the Silent Generation, the Baby Boomers, Generation X, Generation Z. Such labelling wasn’t an Irish thing before Celtic Cubs came along. So today’s children may not translate future resentment into some damning shorthand. In fact, they may not carry the baton of resentment at all. They may instead view their parents as victims.

We have a precedent of sorts here. Through this crisis there has been a sense of one generation having let down those who went before it; of having taken the sovereignty that was hard won only to lose it; of having broken a country that their grandparents and parents scraped so hard to make.

Yet there are opportunities for some self-congratulation too. That’s because they inherited a country that was in atrocious shape. Previous generations – not everyone, of course, but as a collective – may have created a free State, but it was not a place of freedom. It was a cruel, censorious, narrow-minded theocracy.

So the modern generation(s) may have helped to banjax the country financially, but they are also the ones who fixed many of the problems handed on to them. They made it a better place to be gay, to be a single mother or a child, and they encouraged artistic freedom. There have been failures, on a societal and individual level, but in many respects Ireland has emerged a far better place than it was under previous generations.

We can’t be sure what psychological hang-ups the next generation will have, although in the 1990s a couple of American researchers, William Strauss and Neil Howe, came up with a theory of cyclical generations that go through post-crisis high, then rebellion against tradition, followed by individualism and then crisis again. Those who are born in a crisis they call the Artist Generation, because they are overprotected when they mature during the subsequent post-crisis high.

In the meantime, those who have matured during the crisis itself get to be the Hero Generation, the ones who sacrifice most in order to rebuild their country, although Strauss and Howe were talking about a generation that threw itself on to a battlefield, not a bank debt.

But for today’s eight-year-olds, who have yet to grow to a point where their heads are stuck in a pall of bad news, their memories of 2010 may be very different from everyone else’s. Our shame may well be their nostalgia.