Some people are more equal than others

At what age do people stop being children? As we know, following the mind-boggling revelations of last week, the then-59 year old Iris Robinson, a devout Christian and wife of the Northern Ireland First Minister Peter Robinson, figured that a bloke was fair game to fuck at 19, so that’s a benchmark of sorts.

In fact, the age of 18 is generally recognised as the definitive threshold of adulthood. Legally, you can have sex at the age of 17 in Ireland, but you can vote and join the army at 18, as well as operate a fully-fledged bank account and control your own financial affairs.
So why is an increasing level of discrimination against people between the ages of 18 and 25 being built into our laws?
We have written in Hot Press before about the contempt with which younger citizens are treated by the Irish state and indeed by the establishment media. For a long time now there has been an insidious, ongoing campaign against youth, driven by the media and taken up by cowardly politicians, who bought lemming-like into the deeply reactionary and humourless idea that we had bred a generation of teenage delinquents and drunkards.
They saw votes, of course, in playing to the gallery of respectable middle-class Ireland and they did it with knobs on. That rather pathetic phase in Irish political life, during which attacking teenagers became a sort of national pastime, is best symbolised by the introduction of ASBOs by Michael McDowell, when he was Minister for Justice. Of course, those barely legal instruments have proven to be a fiasco, a complete waste of the time, money and hot air that went into their construction. Their failure may have been chastening for the diehards, but the underlying assumption that young people were there to be picked on and kicked around hasn’t gone away.
If you want confirmation, look at the latest budget, generally hailed in the media as exactly what the country needed.
One of the key measures introduced in the Finance Act 2009 was a reduction in the level of social welfare paid to people under the age of 25. Already, those who claim the so-called Jobseekers Allowance at 18 or 19 had been slashed to an allowance of €100 a week. Now citizens of 20 and 21, registering for the first time, have had their payment reduced to the same level. This is effectively half the rate that those over 25 are paid. People between 22 and 24 are also to be discriminated against, their entitlement being reduced to €150, a reduction of approximately 25%.
This is deeply insidious and unfair in a number of ways. In effect, citizens up to the age of 22 at least are being told: you are not entitled to an independent existence. Go and scrounge off your parents. But of course not all parents can afford to continue to support their children after they’ve left school. And not all ‘children’ see it as an acceptable way of managing their affairs either.
Once they’ve left school, young adults have the right to start to shape their own lives. A lot of them see getting out from under their parents’ roof, and escaping the effective control that goes with it, as essential to this. And for very good reason. There is often little or no personal space in a family home, especially for the eldest children. There may be problems with alcohol or other dysfunctional aspects to family life. A bullying father or a manipulative mother may be making the life of an 18 or 19 year old with an independent spirit unbearable.
It is, therefore, often vital for the emotional development of a young adult that they get away from the family home. And besides, this is something which they are entitled to do. But there has been a campaign on the part of officialdom here, and indeed in Britain, to infantilise young adults, to force them to take on a subservient, dependent status even into their 20s. The reduction in the amount of social welfare paid to 20 to 24 year-olds is the latest example in this wider trend.
The measure is being excused on the basis that cuts have to be made somewhere. But it is doubly unfair to attack those who are looking for work for the first time. Many of the people finishing college and coming onto the job market now are 20 or 21 years of age. It is not their fault that they are unable to get jobs: there are none. Indeed, many of them worked part-time to pay their way through college. Now even those jobs have gone, as a direct consequence of the gross mismanagement of the economy by politicians and the catastrophic greed of the Irish banks.
So why are these adults (for that is what they are), who are qualified, ready, willing and able to work, being given the smack in the face that a meagre €100 a week allowance represents? It is an outrageous incitement. No wonder there is such a feeling of disillusionment and betrayal in the air. They were kids when the big economic fuck-ups were happening and yet they are being forced to carry the can for the failures of those in charge of running – or perhaps that should be ‘ruining’ – the country.
A lot of them are leaving. Rather than scrounging off their parents on an ongoing basis they prefer to borrow once and take their chances, heading for England, Thailand, Australia and Argentina among other destinations. Many of them may never come back. It is like the 1980s all over again, when thousands of young graduates, disgusted with the hypocrisy surrounding the abortion referenda and the hopelessly reactionary mood in the wake of the Pope’s visit here in 1979, decided that they’d had enough.
The current generation feel similarly abused by the State, robbed of their independence, and denied the opportunity to work. They will leave in their droves. And who can blame them?