Una Mullally: Young people will rebuild Ireland from ashes

The weekend featured two anniversaries now embedded in Irish modern history: the five-year anniversary of the marriage-equality referendum and the two-year anniversary of a referendum that’s now simply called “Repeal”.

How would we feel about ourselves now if those things hadn’t happened? If all that work hadn’t been put in over the years by women, by the LGBTQ community, by young male and straight allies, and by the resilient fellow travellers who laid the foundations before them? And now, what does rebuilding Ireland again look like when those campaigns were many young people’s formative political experiences?

The potential is vast. It’s within this unique context that Ireland will journey towards something new. Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil see themselves as captains of such a ship, charting a course in a sea spotted with icebergs. Down in steerage, however, we’re gonna need a bigger boat.

If we cast our minds back to the scramble at the beginning of the pandemic, it felt as though Fine Gael’s conscious or subconscious perception of the unemployed remained: that people who lose their jobs immediately enter the fantasy zone of “the welfare class”, and that imposed poverty is a consequence. This has always been Fine Gael’s approach to unemployment, a belief that such a status is somehow imbued with personal culpability.

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When it clicked with the Government that middle-class people were suddenly on the dole, and that they couldn’t possibly be expected to survive on the scraps of €203 a week, the payment was boosted to €350. The messaging since then – that people are gaming the system, or have the cheek to be “better off” on the pandemic payment than in minimum wage jobs with paltry hours – is about blaming those who earn very little for availing of government assistance they are entitled to.

‘Welfare cheats’

During the recent election campaign, Fine Gael politicians left their depleted base behind. Seemingly untouched by quality-of-life issues themselves, they lost their connection to the electorate. Now, incredibly, they’re at it again. When Taoiseach Leo Varadkar talks about “welfare cheats” now, he’s failing to connect with the fact that a lot of people now on welfare are Fine Gael voters, are professionals, are the middle classes. But the real nightmare – for what is looking like one of the most unpopular governments in modern memory before it’s even formed – will be how the cohort set to hurt the most will punish it.

Once people can actually get on the streets in practical terms, the country will be dealing with the biggest youth-led revolution it has seen in a century

Sustained unemployment will disproportionately impact young people. The fallacy of the tech dream down in Grand Canal Dock is quickly emerging, as Big Tech bosses, high off the latest opportunity to disconnect people from each other, have decided they don’t need offices after all. Many places where young people work – bars, restaurants, cafes, salons, clothing shops – will struggle to rehire, if not disappear completely.

Having brought about marriage equality and abortion rights through protest, this will be the tool young people will reach for in their kit for social change and resistance. So keen to hold on to power, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil are doing the political equivalent of walking into a burning building. Even worse than that, they are doing so as entities that among young people are unpopular, divisive, part of the old system, and the authors of both an economic crash and austerity. Varadkar says he wants to get the economy “humming”, but that tune will be a requiem for the Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael duopoly.

Street demonstrations

Once people can actually get on the streets in practical terms, the country will be dealing with the biggest youth-led revolution it has seen in a century. Every political party is facing into that, and it will be the politicians most capable of speaking to the interests of young people who will win the day.

Crucially, this generation of young people in Ireland, plunged into another recession, will not be fuming from Perth, or giving out about Ireland in Toronto, or glad they got out of the kip in Bondi, or bemoaning centre-right governments in Hackney, or getting money together in Qatar to buy a house back home, or emigrating right out of college to New York, or wishing Dublin was better from Berlin. Those young people will be here. This is the first time the Live Register stats that accompany an Irish economic collapse will not be diluted by mass emigration.

Young people responded to the betrayal of the economic crash and austerity policies not with rage, but with a righteous anger

The Greens, if they enter government, will expose themselves to a new generation of voters too young to truly understand the betrayal older supporters felt when their Fianna Fáil coalition was trounced in 2011. History will repeat itself. There are two strands within the modern Green Party; those who view capitalism as the topsoil within which green shoots can potentially thrive, and those who rightly view it as a system fundamentally incompatible with even the concept of sustainability, never mind the practice. It’s the latter faction that will ultimately survive beyond the inevitable Green implosion if and when they decide to participate in government this time. Eamon Ryan won’t have to campaign to bring wolves back, because his party will be thrown to them.

If this sounds scary, noli timere. Young people responded to the betrayal of the economic crash and austerity policies not with rage, but with a righteous anger; not with self-pity, but with empathy; not with stasis but with action; not with division, but with unity. Looking at a country that was disintegrating around them, they built intergenerational movements to make something better out of the wreckage. And they’ll do it again.