Young, Irish and Ready to Leave

And one of the focuses this week was findings of a National Youth Council of Ireland survey which said young adults are so disillusioned with the country that almost seven out of ten of them are considering emigration to give themselves a better quality of life.

And Brenda, you and I would both have children in that age category.

I have three 18 to 24 year olds and two who are just older.

So I know an awful lot about their concerns and the rest of it.

And I'm always determined not to fall into the trap of saying, do you know what it was like for us back in our day? You know, and it's relevant, but it's actually almost irrelevant to the way that they are feeling about things today.

And I would have a lot of sympathy for them in relation to things like that they can't afford to rent, let alone buy.

And now that they have increasing fears about what sort of jobs are they going to have with the emergence of AI.

And, you know, there have always been mental health issues as well that people have had to deal with.

But I think they may have been exacerbated for the current generation by the use of mobile phones and the Internet.

Where do you stand on all of this?

Well, exactly there, because, I mean, as you say, my kids are a little bit older than yours, but I do have in that age group the 18 to 24, of course.

And one of my kids emigrated for a couple of years, came back from Australia this year.

Pretty much everybody I know, Matt, in my friend circle has a kid in Australia or Canada or the UK or the US or wherever they can get to.

And as you say, yeah, if you want to go back to the 80s and say, oh, well, it was very difficult for us.

But at the same time, you could buy a house in the 80s.

You could aspire to buying a house in your 20s if you had a job in Ireland.

Emigration wasn't as big an issue, I suppose, or as inevitable as it seems to be, or at least as the kids today seem to believe that it is.

Immigration was utterly inevitable in the 1980s.

I was thinking about this and writing a piece for the Irish Daily Mail for the weekend on this.

You know, I remember people in my class in college who literally took the boat the morning after their final exams.

And they took the boat because there wasn't Ryanair in 1987 and there weren't cheap flights.

It was instead you took the boat.

The potential for getting a job in the 1980s was really bad.

In my final year in school in the Northmoreland Cork in 1983, a teacher took a survey and there were 37 of us in the class.

That's how big class sizes were back in those days.