Society is paying the price for neglect of generation

A FEW years ago, I visited an educational project for young school-leavers in Dublin's inner city. A small group of older teenagers, all of whom had dropped out of school and many of whom had been in trouble with the law, was being given special help with, basic needs - literacy, numeracy, social behaviour, self-expression.

One method used was to get the students compile a fantastic biography. Using a scrapbook and pictures cut out of magazines - Cosmopilitan, Hello! Shoot - they would put images of the way their lives look in their dreams.

Looking into the fantasy past, there were pictures of bonny babies, smiling parents, happy-go-lucky siblings. In the fantasy present, the boys'

played for Liverpool or Manchester United. The girls with their beautiful bodies and tanned skin barely covered by sleek bikinis were lying on golden beaches in an everlasting sun. In the future, for both sexes, there were white mansions behind stern security gates, swimming pools, Porsches.

And you realised, looking at the scrapbooks, that the biggest, most unrealistic, fantasies were, the past and the present. These young people did not have a past controlled by gracious, bountiful parents. They did not have a present marked by success and luxury. They probably did not know anyone whose past or present conformed even remotely to these illusions.

But they almost certainly knew someone who had lived some version of their fantasy future, some local hard man who had made it as a professional criminal. And even if they did not, the future, by definition, remains open. They could never have a happy childhood or a fulfilling youth, but they could possibly, if they could combine cunning and ruthlessness, have something like the future they fantasised about.

This is what happens when communities fall apart: fantasies become more realistic than other people's normality. The official route to modest success, third-level education, might as well be the Yellow Brick Road. In Cathleen O'Neill's study of, Kilmount, a housing estate in north Dublin, for instance, 37 per cent of school-leavers left without any qualifications, 41 per cent with a Group or Inter Cert, 20 per cent had a Leaving Cert, and a grand total of two had gone on to third level. In 1992, the entire north inner city of Dublin sent nine students to higher education.

THE chances of becoming an underworld Mr Big with a big house and a flashy car may be tiny. But they are bigger than the chances of more modest dreams - a decent job, a pleasant place to live, a stable family life - coming true. So long as this is the case, there will, whatever the law says or does, always be people willing to play the odds. And many more people filling the gap between an intolerable reality and an unattainable fantasy with legal and illegal drugs.

It is a truism that power corrupts. But it is just as true that powerlessness corrupts, and that absolute powerlessness - corrupts absolutely. For the dozens of ex-working class communities all over Ireland left behind by the Irish economic miracle, the sense of powerlessness is endemic.

If there was ever the slightest doubt in the minds of these communities that what happens to them does not really matter, it was banished by the first heroin epidemic of the 1980s. The tidal wave of death and degradation that swept over the working-class estates of Dublin made hardly a splash beyond them. Public policy, such as it was, was primarily one of containment.

When, in 1982, Tony Gregory used an aberrant moment of political advantage to get Charles Haughey to agree a reconstruction package for the inner city of Dublin, conventional wisdom was outraged, not by the need for such a deal, but by the agreement of someone in power to such scandalous squandering of public resources to provide decent houses, to attract some industry, to build a state-of-the art school: The moment passed, Gregory became dispensable, the deal was buried. A gleaming financial services centre was built where the houses were meant to be.

It was not so much that no one in power knew that this neglect might have social consequences. It was that it seemed likely that those consequences would be felt only in places that the society as a whole had already tacitly given up on.

So long as the misery and terror were kept within bounds, the communities at the mercy of the drug barons were left to fend for themselves. As Pete Smyth of Killinarden Community Action Against Drugs pointed out in a letter to this newspaper on Wednesday, "we appealed to the Health Board for facilities to deal with our drug users only to be told that there were no facilities in the area and that there were no short-term plans to do, anything about it". His group, in an area of very high long term unemployment, has to finance its activities by running bingo in the community centre.

Why does it take the murder of journalist for Irish society to understand that there are no bounds any more and the consequences of social degradation are not containable? Why does a young woman have to die to bring home to middle Ireland the ruthlessness of people who, for over to years now, have been openly handing out free sachets of heroin to primary schoolchildren in our cities?

WHY do skulls have to be kicked around an inner city churchyard and the bones of the dead have to be desecrated by grave-robbers before we can understand that a generation of children has grown up with the values of the pusher who will do anything for money and the junkie who will rob anything for the price of the next fix? As Bernard Shaw asked in Saint, Joan, "must a Christ be crucified in every generation to save those who are without imagination?"

The children born during the second oil crisis of 1979, when mass unemployment took an unbroken hold on large sections of Irish society, are now on the brink of adulthood. A whole generation whose members are not only themselves unlikely to find work, but who have never known a working parent, is about to take its place in the adult world.

Many of them, through luck or extraordinary personal endeavour, will have retained the capacity to dream modest dreams of a useful life. But many will already have decided that such goals are too hopelessly fantastic.

For them, there is little left but the needle on one hand or the fantasy lifestyle of the rich and vicious on the other. The society which could not manage the small costs of trying to build and protect their communities while there was still time, will have to find the money to keep them in prisons or drug treatment centres.

And even as it does so, it will know that unless it acts now to do what it should have done a decade ago to support communities in crisis, there will be another damaged generation waiting in the queue to fill the new prison spaces that, to years from now, an angry public will be demanding.