Educational reform means young people are better educated and more informed than any previous generation, writes ELAINE BYRNE.
DEAR COLM, I read your Irish Timesletter to the editor yesterday.
“I have to yet sit the Leaving Cert,” you wrote. When third-level fees are reintroduced “I consider the prospect of a severe financial burden with a lump in my throat”. You then asked if there was any point in paying for an education which you might never use because there won’t be any jobs anyway when you graduate.
Colm, you don’t have that luxury of doubting the future. The International Monetary Fund report expressed the view that Ireland will suffer more than any other developed economy before growth returns. Economist Dan O’Brien synopsised recently that our “unparalleled collapse” was “of a different order to its rich world peers”. UCD professor of economics Morgan Kelly competed in the superlative stakes on these pages with he referred to our unstoppable “drift into national bankruptcy”.
Our budget deficit is three times the European Union limit, unemployment has soared to almost 500,000 and the Government must raise €25 billion in debt this year just to run the country. According to Michael Somers of the National Treasury Management Agency, 85 per cent of Ireland’s debt is held abroad.
In the next 10 years Colm, you will commemorate the 100th anniversaries of the Easter Rising, the first Dáil and the War of Independence which entrusted us with political independence. Yet, we will still continue to struggle for economic sovereignty via high taxation and reduced public services.
By that time the pension crisis will have started to bite. The Economist magazine stated in June that “the demographic bill is likely to be 10 times bigger than the fiscal cost of the financial crisis”. Brian Lenihan told the Dáil last week that the accrued liability of public sector pensions is €75 billion. When the retirement age is eventually raised, we will work for longer for a smaller pension to pay for mistakes made in our childhood.
Implementation of the anticipated harsh Bord Snip report, ratification of the Lisbon Treaty and safe passage for the National Asset Management Agency may allow political leadership to reassert itself. Or maybe the capacity for courageous leadership is simply not there.
"Old Ireland had to die in order for a new one to be born," Prof Tom Garvin noted in the recent RTÉ documentary, Seán Lemass: The Man who Made Modern Ireland.
In 1950s Ireland, Lemass recognised the failure of protectionist economics. Some 50 years later the roots of our moral, political and financial bankruptcy can be pointed to the limits, shortcomings and abject failure of our short-sighted policy-making process.
That “lump in my throat” about which you wrote Colm? That’s because fear has invoked confusion and restrained hope. Fear has that intensifying power to smother the spirit in the absence of a vision for the future.
That’s what made your letter remarkable.
You are thinking about your future, despite your teenage years. You care. You know that this is not good enough anymore and you demand better.
The opinion and letters pages of the
Irish Timeshave witnessed exceptional contributions by this new generation over the last few months. Maeve Jones-O'Connor and Orla Tinsley, for example, have compelled us to think differently about once-impenetrable assumptions on Europe and our health service.
Ireland has demographics on her side. Some 2.8 million of us, two-thirds of the Irish population, are younger than 44 years of age.
We are a nation defined by educational reform. The 1908, the Irish Universities Act established the National University of Ireland. Third-level education could now be accessed by Catholics without censure from the church hierarchy. This extraordinary opportunity educated the emerging political class of De Valera, Costello, O’Higgins, Mulcahy and others.
Donagh O’Malley’s Free Education Act was the second wave of revolutionary educational reform. The 1967 act transformed access to education. No longer was education a right limited to a privileged minority.
The third wave of educational reform, imperfect as it was, saw the abolition of university fees in 1995. Over 55 per cent of school leavers now attend third-level institutes. We are better educated and more informed than any previous Irish generation.
The consequences of this reform have yet to by fully appreciated. Those first to benefit from unprecedented third-level access, myself included, are now in their early thirties, the same age as those that founded the State.
We are a young country with old leaders where new thinking is needed. This is a cathartic era of transformation which gifts us the prospect to reinvigorate society and harness fear into possibility.
We have a lot of State-building to do Colm. The old blood and soil definition of Irishness will be replaced by a confident sense of citizenship which embraces an all-island economy, a closer relationship with our diaspora and innovative ambitions for our environment.
We will take pride in our place in Europe and the world as the UN Secretary General did last week when he praised our long-standing tradition to UN peacekeeping.
Leadership for a new Ireland will come from within our generation.
Hang in there Colm.