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seven - Barriers to participation within a recessionary state: impediments confronting Irish youth
- Edited by Patricia Loncle, Ecole des hautes études en santé publique (EHESP), France, Morena Cuconato, Università di Bologna, Virginie Muniglia, Ecole des hautes études en santé publique (EHESP), France, Andreas Walther, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt Am Main
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- Book:
- Youth Participation in Europe
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 07 September 2022
- Print publication:
- 10 October 2012, pp 109-124
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Summary
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.
two - Youth participation: strong discourses, weak policies – a general perspective
- Edited by Patricia Loncle, Ecole des hautes études en santé publique (EHESP), France, Morena Cuconato, Università di Bologna, Virginie Muniglia, Ecole des hautes études en santé publique (EHESP), France, Andreas Walther, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt Am Main
-
- Book:
- Youth Participation in Europe
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 07 September 2022
- Print publication:
- 10 October 2012, pp 21-38
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- Chapter
- Export citation
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Summary
Introduction
On November 27th 2009 the Council of Ministers responsible for Youth in the 27 Member States of the European Union adopted a resolution endorsing a new EU Strategy for Youth. This strategy, which is based on a proposal by the European Commission made in April of the same year, will guide both the EU institutions and the Member States in pursuing policies to improve the lives of all young people in the coming decade. (Odile Quintin, 2009)
This statement from the general director of the direction of education and culture of the European Commission appears to belatedly recognise the progressive institutionalisation of a sector of youth policies at European level.
Nevertheless, despite the many efforts of the European institutions to orientate in favour of youth policies, despite their attempts to designate priorities and to organise decisions in a comprehensive way, youth policies, at least in national arenas, seem to remain weak, fragmented and poorly funded. Our hypothesis is that a deep hiatus exists between the multiplicities of political discourses on youth on the one hand and the weakness of youth policies on the other hand. One might say that the emphasis on youth participation actually reflects the weakness of youth policies and the lack of strong political will and strategy regarding youth; participation takes the place of political aims and strategies. The discourse on youth participation implies that policy contents are actually being replaced by policy procedures.
One explanation for this discrepancy is that youth policies belong at least partly to the category of symbolic public policy (Edelman, 1960). Youth research has repeatedly pointed to the fact that addressing youth issues serves for reassuring societal actors with regard to concerns of societal reproduction (Kelly, 2001). The notion of youth is itself blurred enough to develop ideological and collective postulates for two main reasons: youth is considered as a problem and/or as a resource for society and it is seen as a way of legitimisation for decision makers. Images of youth as a resource and as a problem have a long history: they appear all across Europe in the context of nation state building at the end of the 19th century; youth was then envisaged as a soldier (or a mother of future soldiers) eager to defend their homelands.