The Irish Times/TNS mrbi youth poll shows how signposts on the road from Kidsville to Ballygrownup are missing, writes Fintan O'Toole
Once upon a time, humanity was divided into two categories - adults and mini-adults. To be young was simply to be weaker and more vulnerable. It did not excuse you from work, marriage and responsibility. And then, slowly at first but quite suddenly from the Victorian era onwards, childhood was discovered. A new and idealised realm of humanity, protected and innocent, came into existence.
After the second World War, a third category was invented. The teenager, a kind of anarchic hybrid, with one foot in the world of work, sex and money and the other in the security and freedom of childhood, ran riot across the cultural and social landscape of the West. And now, as The Irish Times/TNS mrbi youth poll shows, the categories have been shuffled again.
The lines between child, teenager and adult have become blurred.
The signposts on the road from Kidsville to Ballygrownup have been stolen or twisted. The great landmark of sexual initiation no longer maps your position with any certainty. A quarter of 15 to 17 year-olds have had sex, but 14 per cent of 23 to 24 year-olds haven't. The idea that you become an adult when you take your first drink no longer makes even theoretical sense: a quarter of 15 to 17 year-olds are allowed to have a drink at home and the average age at which young people start drinking is around 15 and a half.
Conversely, many adults remain at least partly within the protected realm of childhood. Eighty-one per cent of 20 to 22 year-olds and 53 per cent of 23 to 24 year-olds still live at home with their parents.
Even marriage doesn't necessarily make you an adult in this simple sense: more than a quarter of married young people have still not flown from the parental nest. More generally, it is evident from the poll that there is now no clear dividing line between the teenager and the adult. The changes in attitudes and behaviour from one age to the other are gradual shifts of emphasis, not sudden revolutions.
What we are seeing is a blurring of boundaries on both sides of what was once the great divide. The children are becoming more adult, the adults more childlike. At 15, you might well be having sex, binge drinking, experimenting with drugs and (like more than a third of 15 to 17 year-olds) worrying about the state of the economy. At 24, you might well be living at home, paying no attention to politics, and reading the Irish Sun, which emerges as the most popular daily newspaper for its coverage of sport and pop bands.
This is a generation that is used to having both parents at work, so the old nuclear family, in which childhood was closely supervised by a parent, is becoming untypical. These young people have grown up, for the most part, with the assumption that illegal drugs are not an exotic evil but a fact of life: 87 per cent of the respondents, almost regardless of class, gender or geography, reckon that drugs are freely available in Ireland. (It is striking that this is just as true of rural Ireland as it is of Dublin and the other cities.)
This generation, too, is having to find its own way without the twin pillars of State and Church to act either as a guide or as a target for constructive rebellion. Attitudes to politics seem rather ambiguous. Nearly 60 per cent of the 18 to 24 year-olds intend to vote in next year's elections, even though most of them feel that politics has no relevance to them.
For the Taoiseach, however, a little more ambiguity might have been welcome. It surely says something that among what Fianna Fáil leaders used to call "the Yoot", he is nearly four times more despised than Osama bin Laden. Four per cent of respondents listed the al-Qaeda mass-murderer among the three people they least admire (the same proportion, incidentally, as chose David Beckham); 15 per cent listed Bertie Ahern. The only consolation for him is that there is one figure more unpopular - George W. Bush.
It is surely significant, however, that the favourite political hate-figures of an older generation - Charles Haughey and Liam Lawlor - were also mentioned.
Perhaps the most extraordinary finding of the poll, however, is the dramatic evidence it provides of the decline in Catholic practice among the young. A very substantial majority of 15 to 24 year-olds don't go to Mass, and in Dublin Mass attendance in this age group is now down to just 30 per cent. A stark 62 per cent of young working-class people are not Mass-goers.
Even more alarmingly for the Church, both belief in God and attendance at Mass seem to be declining with age. While 89 per cent of 15 to 17 year-olds are inclined to believe that someone up there is looking out for them, this drops to 81 per cent by the age of 23 to 24. With Mass attendance, the decline is even sharper: from 59 per cent to 38 per cent. It seems clear that the move towards adulthood in Ireland is now accompanied by a move out of the church pew. And this is explained by another finding: more than a third of 15 to 17 year-olds who go to Mass say they do so, not because they want to, but because their parents force them to.
Paradoxically, however, the decline in Church influence is turning out to have a different impact from the radicalisation that most left-wingers dreamed of. The very fact that the Church is not a big issue may be linked to the general lack of interest in party politics. There was a time when young people could link their own desire for sexual liberation with a broader political agenda that also set them against Church orthodoxy. Now it seems that the Church matters less and less and they've just decided to get on with the sex.
Sex in Ireland no longer belongs only to the world of adulthood, let alone that of marriage. (In fact, sometimes not even that of marriage - one of the quirkiest findings of the poll is that 7 per cent of married young people say they have never had sex.) A good deal more than two-thirds of young Irish people have had sex by the time they are 20, and a quarter have done so before they reach 17.
This is not just an interesting finding, but an important one for public policy. Given the amount of trouble that the Irish Family Planning Association got into recently when it distributed information leaflets to teenagers without warning them about the age of consent, it bears repeating that a quarter of those surveyed started their sex lives below the age of consent. Whether anyone likes it or not, they are sexually active, and it is surely time for the education and health systems to take account of that fact, especially since one in eight of the sexually active 15 to 17 year-olds say they don't normally use contraceptives. Since the poll also suggests that those kids in this category who are sexually active have an average of more than three partners, the need to acknowledge this reality is all the more obvious.
Yet just as it would be wrong to ignore these realities, it would be just as foolish to run away with the notion that the young are mindless hedonists. In fact, the big picture is rather disappointing both for those who enjoy a good moan about how the young people of today are gone to the dogs and for the old 1960s dreamers who want the young to run wild. The awful truth is that they are, on the whole, shockingly conventional.
They still expect that when they marry it will be for good, and this is largely true for both sexes and across the class divide. They think money is "very important". They are, to an overwhelming extent, worried about street crime and violence and they want tougher sentences for criminals. They obviously worry about house prices, since most of them don't expect to be able to buy a house or an apartment.
And they are just as hypocritical as their parents. Even though the average age at which they themselves started drinking is 15, more than 90 per cent of them think the legal drinking age should be 18. Eighty per cent of the 15 to 17 year-olds agree with this proposition, even though 60 per cent of them actually drink themselves. Equally, while illegal drugs have become normalised among young people (nearly 60 per cent in Dublin have tried at least one), a majority of them still think that cannabis should not be legalised. Rather bizarrely, it seems that young people nowadays disapprove of the behaviour of young people nowadays.
If these findings suggest a degree of timidity, this may be because many young people are indeed remarkably diffident, especially towards their parents. It is striking, for example, that nearly one in five 18 to 22 year-olds who go to Mass do so because their parents "make" them. These are adults, old enough to vote, to get married and to drink alcohol legally. Yet many of them are still afraid to tell their Daddy (or more probably their Mammy) that they prefer to make their own decisions about religion and spirituality. It is also striking that nearly a quarter of the 18 and 19 year-olds say they are not allowed to have an alcoholic drink at home.
Even stranger is the young people's evident fear of telling their parents that they've had sex. It seems astonishing that almost 40 per cent of the young people who've made love to someone or other won't tell Mammy and Daddy about it. In the 15 to 17 year-old category, of course, this is not at all surprising. But it is surely remarkable that nearly half the 18 to 19 year-olds and a third of the 20-24 age group have never told their parents that they are not virgins. And as a further intriguing twist, young women are much more likely to be up-front than young men. While 34 per cent of the females in the survey keep quiet about it, 44 per cent of the males prefer not to raise the subject.
What are we to make of these findings? It seems clear, for a start, that the notion of anxious parents fussing over their daughters' virginity is largely mythical. Most sexually active young women do at some stage talk to at least one parent about sex. This would suggest that the parents are most concerned, not about the protection of virginity, but about pregnancy. It seems likely that the subject comes up as part of a conversation about contraception (or, of course, as a conversation about the fact that it is now too late to be having a conversation about contraception.)
Many parents, however, seem to avoid talking to their sons about sex. And if this is so it perhaps feeds into two obvious social problems. If sex is not something to be discussed even with sexually active boys, it is hardly any wonder that many young men don't think much about the consequences. On the other hand, the inability of so many young men to discuss their sex lives with their parents - or even to acknowledge that they have sex lives - could well be one of the factors behind the appallingly high rates of young male suicide. (A horrible 55 per cent of those polled know someone in their age group who has attempted or committed suicide.)
Given that sexual relationships can be a source of great hurt and confusion as well as great joy and fun, the silence must form a formidable barrier. Overall, the findings suggest that many parents might usefully spend a little less time complaining about the young and a little more time thinking about their own attitudes.
It is worth noting, though, that if we really want to label any group of young people as sexually promiscuous - and the poll suggests that we would be better off adjusting our sense of normality - the obvious choice would be the children of farmers. It is rather intriguing, indeed, that even though farmers' children are on the whole easily the most conservative, those who break away from the norm seem to do so with something approaching wild abandon. The sexually active middle-class young person has had an average of four partners. The sexually active young farmer has an average of seven.
Given this impressive rate of agricultural productivity, it is also possible to suggest another headline from the poll: Farewell to the Valley of the Squinting Windows. Young people in rural Ireland have an unusually large number of sexual partners.
They are also, however, far more likely than their city cousins to believe that their parents think they're still virgins. This suggests that, contrary to the general belief, it's actually easier to keep your own affairs private in the countryside than in the cities. Shrewd as they may be, the parents of rural Ireland don't know the half of it.