While many of the youth poll findings are predictable, they also highlight the complexities of modern living young people are faced with, writes Róisín Ingle
Lots of young people drink alcohol before the age of 18! Most have had sex by the age of 19! The vast majority of 15 to 24 year-olds believe in God but less than half bother going to Mass!
On the surface, The Irish Times/TNS mrbi Youth Poll does little to challenge our perceptions of younger people and, as such, will have been greeted with sighs of relief by parents around most breakfast tables in the country. It would be a deeply out-of-touch parent who choked on their cornflakes after reading many of this week's revelations.
This made life difficult for radio commentators who, in the absence of truly shocking material, were reduced to getting worked up about the fact that the poll shows eight is the magic number of drinks consumed by young people during the course of what they considered a "good" night out.
Some eyebrows were also raised at the fact that three out of five 15 to 17-year-olds are partial to an alcoholic beverage or three. But the scenes in pubs and clubs after Junior Cert results are released would suggest the other two respondents out of the five were being ever so slightly economical with the truth.
That the average 23 to 24 year- old has had seven sexual partners was perhaps more problematic for older people, but again they will have been relieved to hear that the vast majority use contraception. And that many young women feel comfortable telling their parents about their sexual behaviour.
In relation to drug use, the results were slightly more surprising to some, but only because of the apparent restraint and ambivalence young people are showing about drugs in a society where these substances are almost as available as alcohol. While 82 per cent of respondents said that drugs such as ecstasy, cocaine and marijuana were easy to get hold of, only 14 per cent claimed to use drugs regularly, although just under half have tried drugs at least once.
According to the survey, regular drug use is lower among the 23-24 age bracket. One young woman of my acquaintance, who falls into that age range, was stunned by this result, saying that among her friends "the number who use drugs on a weekly basis is more like 40 per cent". My friend, who lives in Dublin, is convinced the number is much higher and was doubtful about the finding that only 3 per cent of young people use ecstasy.
"Maybe it's just in my circle, but ecstasy use has no stigma, it's totally normal," she says. In her view the young people surveyed were unlikely to have come clean about the real extent of their drug use.
Such conjecture does not apply to more innocent sections of the poll. Most young people have mobile phones, most of them watch around three hours of TV a day and most of them distrust politicians. So far, so predictable. But it is in the area of social attitudes that the survey is most intriguing, particularly when it highlights a conservative, sensible streak among young people, which contrasts with the typical rebelliousness that is supposed to lead to under-age experimentation with sex, drugs and drink.
The young support the Government ban on smoking, for example, albeit by a small majority, while most believe that criminal sentences are not long enough. And they don't want cannabis legalised either. This generation, it appears, is more likely to conform to existing legal constraints in the future than look at ways of opposing them.
The challenges young people feel they face in 21st-century Ireland make for interesting and, in places, quite depressing reading. We know that the suicide rate, especially among young men, is alarming but this was brought into sharp focus by the news that half of those questioned said they knew somebody who has either attempted or has committed suicide.
Perhaps most significantly, the survey offers a rare insight into the problems relating to self-image, particularly among young women. Given the pressures on modern women to achieve a waif-like physique in order to gain social and romantic acceptance, it is hardly surprising that a good proportion of women said they wanted to lose weight. More worryingly, more than half of the females questioned, and a high proportion of the males, said they knew somebody who suffered with an eating disorder. These figures validate the view of those working in the areas of bulimia and anorexia that official figures vastly underestimate the numbers of young women, and to a lesser extent men, whose relationship with food is detrimental to their health.
So while the survey suggests that young people are living up or down to our expectations in terms of drink, drugs and sex, it also shows they have a lot more on their minds than we might have realised.
With most young people also saying they worry about the economy and about crime, the youth poll graphically illustrates how traditional adult issues and some new issues young people haven't had to face in the past are taking their toll on younger members of our population. This is by far the most disturbing aspect of a survey which, while offering an important document on contemporary Irish youth, contained few enough surprises.