We must not allow the future of young people to go in flames

One of the images that has stayed with me since Halloween was taken by a drone used by Dublin City Council to detect wooden pallets destined for illegal bonfires.

The picture showed a neat stack of pallets on the roof of a block of apartments, occupying the space between what looked like two chimney stacks and a low, front-facing wall.

I was struck by the effort and co-ordination it took to get the pallets to the very top of an apartment block from which they would have to be hauled down again later.

At the time I had been reading an article by Ruben Flores, a visiting scholar at Maynooth University, on the experiences of people working in charity shops and on how this work brings meaning, involvement and purpose to their lives.

The connection between hiding pallets for an illegal bonfire and working in a charity shop might not be immediately obvious. But in his article, in the Sociological Review, Flores noted a statement by the French sociologist and philosopher Pierre Bourdieu that tied it all together for me.

According to Bourdieu, we long to be given a place, a name and a function within some group and that longing is fundamental.

While these young fellows were getting those pallets up on to the roof they had a place and a function in whatever group they were part of. I am glad that the city council found and removed the pallets but the fact remains that this project had given these lads a place and a purpose.

That's the link with the charity shops. Charity shops, and indeed volunteering in general, give the workers sense of mattering to somebody else, purpose, companionship, laughter ("Laughter was a constant during my visits to the shops," Flores writes). And if you're looking for these things in your life, volunteering might be the place to go (try Volunteers Ireland at volunteer.ie).

But what about the lads with the pallets? I don’t see much likelihood of them turning up as volunteers in a charity shop any time soon.

This is an issue that we really have to address as a society in relation to young men and young women who engage in what we see as antisocial behaviour.

Suppose they give up their antisocial behaviour and become model citizens? What will life hold for them then?

Suppose they are poorly educated, perhaps coming from a background in which there is little respect for education, and in which you as well ask a young teenager to climb all the way to the top of Mount Everest as to make the long journey to a master’s degree. This because we seem to be constructing a society in which you could, one day soon, be asked to have a masters in environmental engineering before you are allowed to clean the streets.

So what are these young people going to do? Are they going to sit at home all day watching game shows? Is that really a life?

Suppose you were one of them, that you needed to escape what the existentialists called the absurdity of existence and that criminality was an immediately available option – can you be sure you wouldn’t take that direction?

Of course, this argument could have been made for many decades past but the difference between then and now is the transfer of jobs from humans to machines. You don’t need me to tell you that this transfer is gathering pace. Many of us have walked into a supermarket or store where the people who used to scan goods and take your money have disappeared.

People need meaning in their lives and how to provide meaning in a world in which work is changing utterly is a fundamental question for our society in our time.

I don’t have an answer to the question but I think it’s an issue we need to think about and discuss and debate.

We can confiscate the Halloween pallets but we must not allow the future of young people to go up, metaphorically or literally, in flames.

Padraig O’Morain (pomorain@yahoo.com) is accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His latest book is Mindfulness for Worriers. His daily mindfulness reminder is free by email.