A generation of young Irish people is "growing up alone" due to the pressures placed on family and community by the State's "economic miracle", sociologist Fr Harry Bohan has said.
Schools are being expected to "take up the slack" and about 10 per cent of pupils in an average educational institution require personal and financial support, Fr Bohan told a seminar hosted by NUI Galway's community knowledge initiative yesterday.
Fr Bohan, founder of the Céifin Centre for Values-Led Change in Co Clare, said that both Government and society were "turning a blind eye" to this reality, which was backed up by recent Central Statistics Office (CSO) figures - and by experiences in his parish.
CSO figures had shown that in Dublin, just 20 per cent of units could now be described as the "traditional family", while adolescents spent less than 5 per cent of their time with parents and less than 2 per cent with other adults.
"Next Tuesday night in my parish, we are starting a 'meaning to life' programme, because there are too many young people dying in our area," Fr Bohan said. "We can't allow our young people to be giving up, whether it is by dying on the roads or in other ways."
He noted that in recent years, there had been very few or no applications for principalships in many schools, due to the pressures involved. "Even many schools without disadvantaged status are now faced with sourcing personal and financial support for pupils at risk," he said.
"One has to ask why workplaces can so easily respond to market trends, but cannot respond when it comes to allowing people to rear their kids," he said.
This week's announcement by multidenominational school organisation Educate Together that it intended to move into second-level education for the first time was "welcome", Fr Bohan said, given the emergence of a pluralist society and the extent of immigration.
However, there was also a place for denominational schools, given that the "collapse of the family" was a challenge facing all of Europe. This had been acknowledged by Archbishop Seán Brady at a talk which Fr Bohan gave Armagh priests last week, he recalled.
"Who is rearing the next generation - that question needs to be answered - and it can't just be left to schools," he said.
Stressing that he was "very grateful for the economic miracle", having lived through the "psyche of the Famine, along with emigration and unemployment, he acknowledged that major changes had taken place in Irish society every 40 years.
However, this had to be one of the most challenging, and there were no "great names" like "O'Connell, Parnell, Collins, de Valera" to guide society. People lacked a leadership with vision and were now living in a climate of "mistrust and suspicion".
"We are drowning in information, but we don't know whom to believe - whether clergy, politicians, business people, and most of all the media - and the present generation is being betrayed by preceding generations," he said.
However, he detected a new type of vision, based on a "social and moral leadership" emerging "from the ground".