A country should pay attention when its young adults tell it that this is not a place they want to live. That is the uncomfortable message of new Red C polling for the National Youth Council of Ireland (NYCI), in which 68 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds say they are considering a move abroad and 71 per cent believe life would be better elsewhere. Housing and the cost of living dominate their reasons, while nine in ten say secure, well-paid work is becoming harder to find.
The findings deserve to be taken seriously, but not at face value. The places young Irish people actually favour as destinations, chiefly in Australia, Canada and Britain, wrestle with housing crises every bit as acute as ours, and in several cases worse. And while the figures do not correlate exactly, CSO data shows the number who leave in any year is a very small fraction of those who say they might, and many of those who do go will return within a few years. The image of a generation fleeing the country en masse is often conjured up for rhetorical effect but is simply not borne out by the facts.
What the poll does capture is a real and corrosive disillusionment among the young that cost pressures, driven above all by housing, are narrowing their choices and dimming their hopes for the future. That view is shared by the wider public, which the poll shows agrees that this cohort is treated unfairly by a State that prefers not to tax assets such as property, held mostly by older people, while leaning on wages and consumption, an arrangement that favours the old at the expense of the young.
The poll accompanies the NYCI’s pre-budget submission, which seeks to equalise jobseeker’s payments for under-25s, abolish sub-minimum youth pay rates, provide free public transport and cut the student contribution fee further. Some of this has merit. Some is the special pleading every budget season brings. But the real problem for Ireland’s young adults lies elsewhere, in the ever-widening gulf between them and their home-owning elders.
