doing it for the kids

Attention all young people! Attention all young people! You are hereby advised to place yourself under house arrest. Stock up on emergency supplies and return to your quarters immediately. Once inside, seal all windows and buttress all doors. Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to leave the building until further notice. Ignore anyone who tries to lure you into the open, however plausible they may initially appear. If you can lay your hands on either a communicado or a cognito, it s definitely time to get in.
The forthcoming General Election is not going to be as bad as you might expect. It will almost certainly be even worse. Without exception, the political parties have decided to mount an almighty assault on the youth vote and they will stop at nothing in their onslaught.
Think of that ferocious image of a finger-pointing Uncle Sam in James Montgomery Flagg s celebrated I WANT YOU FOR U.S. ARMY recruiting poster. Then, replace Uncle Sam with the archetypal grinning, winking, bewigged Teachta Dala, and you ll have some inkling of the horror that awaits.
As a rule, party strategists don t like the young. They see you (and your ilk) as pesky greenhorns with no previous form and no sense of allegiance. All that wide-eyed idealism tends to make you unpredictable, the most dreaded word in the political schemer s lexicon. However, much to their crimson-gilled vexation, the demographics now make the young impossible to disregard.
Forty-two of the Irish population are under 25 years of age. Over 50% are under 30; 375,000 people will be entitled to vote for the first time in the 1997 election. There s electoral gold in them there tills.
One might imagine that a concentration on the youth constituency would be good news and would herald a commensurate concentration on youth issues. But imagination has never been a strong suit among Irish politicians. For many of them, communicating with the young means talking to people like they were two-year-olds.
They don t so much want to stand foursquare with the next generation as lurk beside them. They act like surly cops gathered around the hospital bed of a recovering suspect; hovering in a resentful, wary vigil, the sole purpose of which is to stop anyone else from making contact. Sure, they want the patient to get better, but only so that they lock him up in the system and then throw away the key.
As the disgraced political class gather together the remnants of their authority and button them tightly about themselves with as much dignity as they can muster, they believe that their last, best hope for survival lies in currying favour with the young. You have been warned. Get inside and treble-lock those bolts now!
NIGHTCLUB ALERT
Scrutiny of the main establishment parties and their assorted strategies for winning the youth vote reveals that we have entered the era of Wacky Veg politics.
As those who follow global current affairs will know, Wacky Veg are the new line of fun frozen vegetables recently launched in Britain and aimed at encouraging toddlers to eat their greens. The Veg are regular veg but are Wacky because they re spiked with flavours more appetising to their target market. Wacky Veg carrots taste of chocolate, Wacky Veg sweetcorn smacks of pizza and Wacky Veg cauliflower comes in delicious cheese n onion.
In the world of Wacky Veg politics, the usual old unsavoury cabbage has been spiced up in a desperate attempt to make it more appealing to the young voter s palate. Leading the Gadarene rush of Wacky Vegocrats are Young Fine Gael (age-range: 18 to 28). During the past two years, while their senior party colleagues have been at the helm of the rainbow coalition, YFG has increased its rank and file by a staggering 450%. It now boasts a membership of 4,500 spread over 62 branches nationwide, and plans to play a major role in the election campaign.
We have had a huge recruitment drive in preparation for this election, asserts Ethel Power, Fine Gael Youth Officer and the holder of both a marketing degree and a masters in management. The key to our success has been striking a very healthy balance between political and social activities. Our members would be very fun-loving, active people. We have marketed politics to them as a fun and active way of life.
We have a very busy calendar of social events throughout the year. We d host a weekend in, say, Athlone, with policy discussions during the day and a bash at night. We have a barbecue every June at party headquarters and a great Christmas party. There are regular Young Fine Gael discos. And debates between Young Fine Gael and Ogra Fianna Fail.
Sounds boss, doesn t it? Invigorated by such orgiastic high jinx, the fun-lovers of Young Fine Gael have devised a programme of wonderful and novel ideas for attracting the nation s youth to the gospel according to Fine Gael in the coming weeks. I have to keep them undercover at the moment, sighs Ethel Power. But they are exciting. They ll be very alternative. We will add an element of fun to the campaign. All I can say now is that there ll be a lot of street theatre.
Like many of the tacticians to whom I spoke, Ethel Power brims with admiration for the Spring Chicken offensive carried out by the Young Progressive Democrats. When Dick Spring refused to accept Mary Harney s challenge of a face-to face election debate, a number of Young PDs dressed up in lurid-yellow chicken outfits and started popping up in close proximity to Spring at embarrassing moments.
The publicity attained by this ingenious political initiative has, evidently if implausibly, become the envy of PD opponents and allies alike. Expect, therefore, to see plenty more fowl play during the campaign. Once one party does that, you ve got to retaliate, says Ethel Power. Or, eh, answer back, reply, I should say.
Of course, nobody is more proud of the Chicken coup than the Young Progressive Democrats themselves. Their spokesperson is 27-year-old Elizabeth Birdthistle. Limerick-born, like the sado-monetarist PD concept itself, Ms. Birdthistle formerly worked as the marketing manager for Funderland. She clearly has a penchant for representing organisations that take the public on scarifying rides and leave their stomachs feeling queasy.
I think the Spring Chicken did an awful lot of damage to Dick Spring, Elizabeth gloats. Just after it came out, there was a poll and Dick Spring was found to be very arrogant. He refused to debate Mary Harney for one reason and one reason only, the only person to gain would be Mary. Labour supporters have acknowledged that themselves.
He d have been better off if he d laughed it off, or even said yes to a debate but didn t set a date, rather than blatantly saying no. The Young PDs took it as an insult.
Will the PD high command be encouraging the YPDs to engage in further stunts of this kind as polling day approaches? It s not that they re encouraged, insists Elizabeth. It s completely up to themselves. For example, off their own bat, four Spring Chickens went to the Labour conference. I went down to have a look at what they were up to. They had six-foot cut-outs of chickens as well.
It was hysterical, the amount of people who were getting so irate with these chickens. The chickens were just sitting down on the side of the road having a picnic. They enjoyed it but you had to feel sorry for them. It was 17 degrees and they were inside very heavy chicken suits.
In their remorseless pursuit of the young, the electioneering squads will observe no boundaries. Even the nightclub, once the internationally-recognised safe haven for all, has been deemed a legitimate theatre of war. Canvassers aligned with Fianna Fail, Labour, the Progressive Democrats and the Greens admitted to us that they would be bringing their campaign onto the country s dancefloors. Only Fine Gael and Democratic Left baulked at the suggestion.
We go to where the people are, declares a senior Fianna Fail spinphysician. That means standing outside churches, going to livestock marts, attending football matches. One of the best ways to get to young people in good numbers is in nightclubs and that s what we re going to do. We make no excuses for that.
PLASTIC POLICIES
Recent weeks have seen the publication of two significant polls on the attitudes of young Irish people towards politics. The first was a National Youth Council of Ireland survey, with a sample group of 2,000, which identified drugs, unemployment and crime (in that order) as the key issues of concern to those in the 18 to 24 age group. The same survey indicated that one third of young voters had either not registered or did not intend to vote in the General Election.
Subsequently, there was an Irish Times/M.R.B.I poll charting youth support for the various political parties. When broken down, it emerged that, among 18 to 24-year-olds who were going to vote, Fianna Fail were by far the most popular party. FF s rating amid this sector was an astounding 52%, a whole nine points higher than the party s total support level of 43%.
Rivals have dismissed these findings as the result of a rogue poll. Even if this is the case, however, there is some evidence that Fianna Fail are experiencing a surge of popularity among the young (a tally of 26% also saw them top the NYCI poll). The FF backroom boys admit that they have been pleasantly surprised by this development but are, nevertheless, eager to put it down to the youthful, man-of-the-people charisma of their leader, Bertie Ahern.
Others beg to differ. Young people in third level institutions are more conservative and that s unfortunate, affirms Dan Boyle, a 34-year-old Green party councillor making a bid for election as a TD in Cork South Central. This skewers the polls. There are a lot of things for young people to be angry about. If they could be angry and were able to energise and mobilise that anger, we could get a lot more social change in this country a lot quicker than we re likely to. Fianna Fail are not going to facilitate that change.
Fianna Fail s Youth Affairs spokesperson is Brendan Smith (no, I d never heard of him either), a sprightly young Cavan man of 40 summers. Keen not to sully his flawless record of anonymity this close to a General Election, Brendan seemed extraordinarily reluctant to speak to Hot Press. He would return phonecalls only to explain that he wasn t at his desk right now and so couldn t answer any questions.
Bashful Brendan did, however, manage to break away from the quest to locate his desk long enough to send us a fax outlining the names of some newly-published and, no doubt, dazzling FF policy documents. If we required any further clarification, we were to contact one of the party s spinquacks.
This seems rather odd behaviour for an opposition party with a pitch to make, but who are we to judge? Perhaps Fianna Fail are winning friends among the young precisely because they are so unwilling to pester anybody with nasty intrusions such as ideas, arguments or convictions. It s true what their leaflets say, they are the party of society s voiceless.
Fine Gael, meanwhile, are determined to make plenty of noise. They ll be blowing their own trumpet and banging their own drum about what they see as their proud achievements for young people. Now, what achievements would they be exactly?
I think the word youth is over-spun, avers YFG s Ethel Power. Young people are affected by the issues that affect people of all ages. Whether they re in education or not, the primary issue for young people is a good job. We can immediately point to the fact, that, over the last two years, we ve created 1,000 new jobs per week. They haven t been taken up by older people. 90% of them have been taken up by young people coming out of college or school.
It s like a putting a carrot in front of young people. What are they interested in? When they re in college, they re not interested in what s happening in second level education which is a so-called youth issue. They re thinking, What kind of a car am I going to drive when I m 24? Am I going to have a job that s going to allow me to buy that car and to go on a foreign holiday twice a year? .
Remarkably, the doughty crew of the Starship Free Enterprise over at Young Progressive Democrats HQ are far less gung ho about young people boldly going on foreign holidays. The YPDs expect us all to go apeshit with excitement about, erm, plastic bags.
We ve just launched our environment document, trills Elizabeth Birdthistle. I think it s incredibly radical and it s going to go down very, very well with young people. I m very proud of our environment policy. The Young PDs have put a lot into it. We re talking about introducing taxes on plastic bags, which would produce #500 million a year.
We ve got to encourage people to use paper bags and to re-use bags. The only way to do that is to put a tariff on them. And on cans, as well. Denmark has no cans. We want a special tax on non-returnable cans, to encourage people to use bottles. I don t think anyone can complain because they know it s going to the environment. It s our future.
Dan Boyle of the Greens is not impressed. He believes our future would be infinitely brighter if we were to introduce a special tax on Young PDs. Every time these parties mention the environment, they win us votes, argues Boyle. It s the biggest compliment they can pay us. Not only are the electorate cynical, they are justifiably cynical. They can see through the fact that the other parties are willing now to put in place environmental policies that they have been unwilling to put in place for many years. These parties have actually overturned policies and caused environmental problems. They are not sincere and not to be trusted or believed.
We don t have an elitist or ageist attitude to politics anyway. We ve had 18-year-old candidates in several election campaigns. We see the other youth wings as a way of marginalising the young rather than involving them in politics.
YOUTH MINISTER
Last February, the Late Late Show hosted a panel discussion with a gaggle of young politicians from all of the major parties. It was one of the most profoundly depressing television events in the history of the state.
Bouffed and fouffed to within an inch of their lives, the young guns fired nothing but dum-dums. They spoke with all the humour, clarity and passion of a Ministerial reply to a parliamentary question. They spewed clueless, hyperglycaemic generalities at every turn and showed scant sign that they possessed even a trace of the quality that is supposed to be the birthright of the young, i.e. youth.
Prominent among the young fogeys was Tuam-based Colm Keaveny, a 26-year-old former President of the Union of Students in Ireland who is hoping to become a Labour TD for his native Galway East (now a four-seat constituency). A rising star within the Labour party, Keaveny spent the six months of the Irish EU Presidency in Brussels, working as a Youth Officer for Policy Development on the new Maastricht treaty.
Essentially, he was a lobbyist, employed by the National Youth Council of Ireland, whose mission was to ensure that the proposed new constitution of Europe will recognise the role of young people and youth organisations.
Keaveny acknowledges that such endeavours mean little to ordinary young folk. Yet he insists that he is doing it for the kids. But is there not a sense in which by the very act of becoming a politician, a young man like Keaveny has already decamped from the reality of life for the great mass of young people?
If you look at my political background, I don t know any different, he pleads. I am a politician. I can t help but say that I m willing to go and offer myself to public life and public service. I am trying to change the perception of politics in general. Whether you like politics or not, people don t have a right to give out about politics unless they participate within the process. I m offering a new image, new politics. It s time for the people to unshackle themselves from stale, unrepresentative politics.
Keaveny says that he was pleased with his Late Late Show performance. He claims that the odds were stacked against him personally by Gay Byrne s attitude during the interview and is adamant that this is more than standard Labour party paranoia.
To be fair, all of those young politicians were very, very nervous, Keaveny attests. A lot of them would have been tutored to Hell. I wasn t myself because I worked quite a lot on live television and radio when I was President of USI. But I was also quite suspicious that my friend, Gay Byrne, is a red-hot Fianna Fail supporter.
I was the only one of the candidates that he wouldn t shake hands with before the show. I immediately felt that he had his hand on his holster for me. So, I had my hand on my holster and was willing to shoot if he was willing to shoot. In the end, I was happy with the programme. If you were to get a 30 second ad during the Late Late Show, it would cost more than an arm and a leg. I m running my campaign on good faith and not finance. The Galway East constituency is 80 miles long and 40 miles wide and I ve been out on the road looking for votes every day since that Late Late Show.
Will Keaveny be canvassing in the nightclubs of Galway East? I have already been doing so, he retorts. The other politicians now say that they re going to follow me into the nightclubs, but the one thing that they can t do that I can do is dance. The Fianna Failers are very angry and desperate about that. Going to nightclubs is an alternative to going to funerals. There s a backlash against that kind of politics. I refuse to do that.
Twenty-four-year-old Democratic Left councillor Anthony Creevey was another guest on that shameful Late Late Show. A religion teacher in St. Kevin s College, Clondalkin, by day, Coolock-born Creevey is the Chairperson of Young Democratic Left (membership: 150 approx.). In February, he was co-opted onto Dublin City Council to replace his party colleague, Pat McCartan, who was exalted to the position of Circuit Court Justice.
My success has been phenomenal, proclaims the unfailingly modest Creevey, who hopes to regain McCartan s Dail seat in Dublin North East in the General Election. When I joined, the constituency was in bits. Pat McCartan had almost gone into retirement while still being a councillor. I rebuilt the constituency. I m very competent. I m highly-motivated and have always had good leadership skills.
Creevey believes that he came across very well on the Late Late. I don t think that I came over like a young fogey, he protests. I take your point about the fact that some of the panel were just younger versions of the old-style politicians. Up to the age of 23, I had hair down to my back. I used to wear 14-hole Docs and combats and go on marches. I got my hair cut because I m receding. It didn t look good when I started to lose it. I had it long for five years and I needed a change.
I m an average 24-year-old. I like to go for a drink, I smoke cigars. I go out, I socialise. I play football. I like to have a good time. But the fact is that I m very committed to the area I live in and I want to be involved in the decision-making process. I worked as a youth worker in Coolock. I co-founded The Lunchbox Theatre Company in Coolock. The ethos there was community development through the medium of the arts, to work with young people, to develop their talents, to harness their ability, to empower them to be the best they can be.
Although people say that young people are the future, their needs are very immediate and aren t being looked at sufficiently. I come from the heart of Coolock and 2.8% of the young people from our area make it to third level. To be educated as I am, to have made it to third-level, I feel I have a responsibility to the people around me. It s a clichi but you are either part of the solution or you re part of the problem.
Like the youth-wing candidates of all parties, Creevey supports the introduction of a specific junior ministry for youth affairs. But how can he sell himself as a new, alternative voice when Democratic Left have been in government for over two years?
We have a very proud record in government, he contends. But we can t redress 70 years of mismanagement in two years. We can only start. Judge us on our merits. We did hold the balance of power and we got an awful lot out of the other two parties. I voted against going into government and I have been proved totally wrong. The country has benefited by DL being in government.
Sports Minister Bernard Allen is also the rainbow coalition s Minister for Youth Affairs. He s hardly blazed a trail of glory, has he?
Exactly! bellows Creevey. That s why I want his job. I d do it much better. Why do you think I m calling for a separate, specific Ministry. It s an insult to young people to throw them in with sport. Only .1 of 1% of all the EU money we get goes on youth affairs. That s ridiculous! It should be at least ten times that. Allen should get his act together and get to Brussels and really start shaking them up. That s what I d do. That s what I will do.
DRUGS QUESTION
Over the coming weeks, you re likely to hear a great deal of pious hand-wringing about how tragic it is that so many of our young people have opted out of the electoral process. Their apathy will be pitied, their disenchantment mourned. The truth is, however, that by choosing not to vote, a huge swathe of the young population are making a very eloquent and sophisticated statement about the ethical and ideological bankruptcy of the Irish political establishment.
Most young people understand that having a vote every five years is not the same thing as participating in democracy. They are all too aware that barely the thickness of a ballot paper separates the main parties when it comes to the major economic and social issues. More to the point, the intelligent young person realises that the-powers-that-be have been habitually and cynically lying to the people of this country for as long as anyone can remember, and nowhere more flagrantly than on the question of drugs.
With straight faces, and in tones of mock gravitas, the political hacks will routinely belch out the stock condemnations of the evils of hash or E before heading off to concuss themselves with alcohol in the Dail bar. Those that care know that the international War on Drugs has been fought and lost. Those that don t care, well, don t care.
So, what about the next generation of political chieftains? Are they too playing with Confederate money? Or, are they prepared to tell the truth and shame the spindoctors? Their replies tell us all we need to hear about the future of politics in Ireland. Read em and weep.
The reaction, among young people, to the argument in favour of legalising cannabis is amazing in that it s quite negative, propounds Ethel Power of Young Fine Gael. It s a kind of an issue that politicians think will get the young vote. But I think young people are becoming more conservative, certainly compared to ten years ago. I find this all the time. They have a more adult view, a more adult outlook on things.
Isn t it absurdly hypocritical for politicians with heavy booze habits to lecture the rest of us on the merits of a drug-free life?
I think now that you re well aware that there is a difference between drugs and alcohol, says Ethel. When I m talking about drugs, I m not talking about alcohol and I don t think anybody else is either. When I m talking about drugs, I would be talking about heroin, cannabis, hash and whatever. I know alcohol is a drug but I don t put it in the same category. If a TD or a Minister is talking about drugs and then goes drinking, maybe they ve got to be made aware of that as well, but I don t think so.
(At this point, in the interest of balance, and in the absence of a party spokesperson of their own, I should state that Fianna Fail have a policy of Zero Tolerance on crime of all kinds and that they also have an enticing range of attractive views on the drugs issue which you can read all about in their rip-snorting document, A Radical Approach To Drugs And Drug Related Crime.)
For the Greens, Dan Boyle advocates that handy old equivocal stand-by, the national debate. The Greens have some difficulties with legalising cannabis, to be honest, he states. We re talking about environmental issues, air pollution and water quality and things like that. A situation where people might be encouraged to put chemicals in their body is something that would be open to misinterpretation. At the end of the day, the central question is whether the state has a role in stopping people who, given all the information about substances, are willing to use those substances.
Well, does it? I think that s what the debate is about, to be honest.
Wouldn t a lot of Green supporters be regular dope users? Yes, Boyle concedes. A lot of Green party supporters would be people who take a lot of alcohol and who smoke nicotine as well. I don t think it s the sole basis for Green party support. And I don t think that, in this election, drug decriminalisation is going to be the central issue. There s a lot of things that we need to do yet before we even get talking about decriminalisation or legalisation.
Democratic Left s Anthony Creevey is explicitly hostile to any talk of drug law liberalisation. I wouldn t agree with any sort of tolerance for drugs, he professes. You may argue very validly that alcohol is a drug and that cigarettes are a drug but, you know, I m certainly not for the legalisation of cannabis.
I live in the heart of Coolock where drugs are an everyday reality. I work in Clondalkin where we re surrounded by them. Prevention rather than cure. Let s look at the root causes of why people take drugs.
Over in Galway East, Labour s Colm Keaveny argues the exigencies of realpolitik. It s going to be very difficult for me to say yes to the decriminalisation of something like cannabis, he confesses. Obviously, I m coming from a background where I have fought on a lot of liberal issues. However, it would be political suicide for me to say I would decriminalise cannabis in Galway East. You can accuse me of being a hypocrite but hypocrisy is one component of politics. Sometimes, hypocrisy is important to ensure that things are achieved.
Drugs is an issue but it s an issue for all the wrong reasons. It s an issue because of the crime that s associated with it. Are politicians brave enough to say we should look at alternative methods of dealing with the problem.
Is Colm Keaveny brave enough to do so?
I want to be brave enough to win this election first. I could win votes by calling for decriminalisation but can you imagine the votes that I wouldn t get? Young people alone will not put me into Dail Eireann. Young people know what I m up to at the weekends. Young people know where I drink. Young people know what I smoke. Young people know what I enjoy.
I m not afraid to rub shoulders with anybody. When you re a pioneer and you ve got those two little silver feet coming out of your lapels, you re not going to get on well in The Cellar Bar in Tuam if there s going to be some slammin techno tune in the background and there s lots of wheelin and dealin going on. I m in there watching the football and the kids know that. The kids are happy that they have an instrument that is willing to stand up there and try to do something for them.
Initially at least, the Young Progressive Democrats seem refreshingly upfront. Government just saying drugs are bad for you isn t stopping young people taking them, observes Elizabeth Birdthistle. A more radical approach is going to have to be taken. That s something we re working on. Ecstasy is now a culture. Lots of men in suits telling 18 and 19-year-olds that it s bad for them isn t really working.
Ogra Fianna Fail and Young Fine Gael develop their own policies. The way the Progressive Democrats is organised is that the Young PDs have representation on all our policy making bodies. Every committee for policy making has to have a Young PD on it.
So, what radical approach will the YPDs be advocating?
I m going to have to speak to Liz O Donnell about that to get a total viewpoint on it, says Elizabeth Birdthistle. I know she s been working on it recently. There have been some interesting suggestions made but I ll have to run them by Helen Keogh as well, the party spokesperson on Health and Education. n