Youth, as George Bernard Shaw didn't quite say, is wasted on the young. Yet it may also be true that information about the young is wasted on the middle-aged and the old whose voices dominate public debates in Ireland.
Too often, when young people figure in those debates, it is merely as a set of problems: too much drink, too many drugs, too many teenage pregnancies. The pace and depth of social change in Ireland over the last 20 years are such that even relatively young parents often feel that the landscape of their own early years has been swept away and that youth today is a foreign country. In this climate of uncertainty, exaggerated anxieties take hold and stereotypes of unruly hedonism emerge.
The Irish Times/TNS mrbi youth poll provides a detailed map of young Ireland which confirms the scale of change and confounds the stereotypes. It shows us that for the generation that has grown up in the 1980s and 1990s, the great pillars of certainty - family, Church and State - have indeed been crumbling. The old-style nuclear family with Daddy at work and Mammy at home is no longer the norm; more than half come from a home with a working mother. The role of the Church is massively diminished, with a large majority of young people no longer attending Mass. Politicians are not trusted and a majority see politics as an irrelevance.
This withering of authority is, indeed, reflected in a willingness to engage in behaviour of which parents, priests and politicians might not approve. Sex before marriage is now the norm. Binge-drinking is undoubtedly a serious problem. Most young people are at least aware of the easy availability of illegal drugs. Yet it is also important to reflect that today's young people are arguably practising much more self-restraint than their parents at the same age.
The external restraints of authority and lack of money have greatly diminished. The opportunities for sex, drink and drugs are vastly greater than they were 20 years ago. Yet the vast majority of under-18s have not had sex and the vast majority who are sexually active use contraceptives. Getting hold of cannabis or ecstasy is regarded as easy by most young people - yet most have not tried these drugs and few use them regularly. It is too easily forgotten in the sporadic outbreaks of moral panic that young people have choices in areas where their parents did not and that most of them are exercising those choices responsibly.
Above all, in providing a sense of perspective in public debates, the poll reminds us that nearly 70 per cent of our young people feel that Ireland is a good place for them. This is not an excuse for smugness or a licence to forget the significant and unhappy minority, but it ought to be a source of modest pride. Many previous generations can remember when, as recently as the late 1980s, Ireland had no place at all, never mind a good one, for so many of its young, and sent them away in vast numbers. The knowledge that most of our young people regard this as a good place should encourage the rest of us to involve them in making it a better one.