Introduction

This chapter explores the effects on young people's participation in an Ireland engulfed by a major economic recession. It reviews the notion of change in relation to young people in Irish society and the status of young people, with a particularly critical focus on the emerging trend of portraying young people as ‘children’ in a policy context.

Thereafter we explore the role the Youth Work as the ‘engine’ driving young people's participation, before offering the reader a concluding section focused on the current relationship represented by the participation/youth/social change nexus in contemporary Ireland.

The reader should bear in mind that in common with other jurisdictions, Ireland does not have a precise definition of participation; instead, the term is often bandied about due to its positive connotations. In reality, young people's experiences of participation run along a continuum, from the tokenistic ‘attendance equals participation’ version to what we might characterise as ‘real and meaningful’ participation. From this chapter's perspective, we have used the phenomenon of exercising power in the sense of having decision-making competences as our idealised opposite of tokenistic participation.

Background: a transitional society

Ireland has experienced vast changes in the past two decades: ‘It would be difficult to find an example of such deep, intense and rapid transformation as has occurred in Ireland’ (Peillon and Corcoran, 2002, p 1). Ireland during the 1980s saw recession, emigration and violent political activism. Unemployment and emigration had a heavy impact upon the young. The Irish state was conservative and secretive, and the Roman Catholic Church held an inordinate sway over politics, health and education policy and population control (Tovey and Share, 2003). From 1987 the government began using a corporatist model of governance to overcome economic difficulties. Through the 1990s improvements became noticeable (Allen, 2000). These encompassed a resolution of Ireland's historical meta-narratives (McCarthy, 2000) as represented by the peace process in Northern Ireland, globalisation, a free-market approach to business and the widening of participation in education. Ireland did experience a boom in the early years of the millennium. However, the government catastrophically mismanaged this boom resulting in a disastrous collapse of state finances.