Being an Irish young person is not easy. Sure, they have more money than most of us ever dreamed of, but with that comes pressures that older people did not have to face until well into adulthood.
Some of those pressures are exacerbated by an overwhelmingly negative tide of commentary on young people. Take the issue of alcohol.
Certainly, many young people drink excessively, with extremely serious consequences for their health, but alcohol abuse is routine among adults in Ireland, too. Yet you don't see investigative documentaries analysing the social impact on teenagers of adult drinking patterns. God knows, the exemplars would be easy to find, whether it be red-faced 50 year olds falling out of pubs after a rugby match, or 40-somethings driving home after dinner parties where the wine bottle count exceeds that of a recycling centre. As a result, we manage to make the young people who drink moderately feel as if they are profoundly out of step with the norm.
Similarly, there is a real problem with discipline in schools. However, as the recently published Task Force on Student Behaviour at Second Level report emphasises again and again, a small minority of pupils are causing the vast majority of the difficulties. Yet they end up taking up a disproportionate amount of teachers' time, not to mention media interest.
Dr Dermot Stokes is the national co-ordinator of Youthreach, an organisation that works in second-chance education and which has had great success with young people at risk. When he spoke some time ago in positive terms about the younger generation, he was somewhat taken aback to find himself inundated with requests to speak on local radio. Obviously, and recent research from the National Youth Council of Ireland confirms this, saying supportive things about young people is so rare as to be newsworthy. While speaking this week to Dr Stokes, who is also a member of the taskforce on discipline, he commented that it often seems to him that Irish people love their children, but they don't love children. It is a perceptive remark.
We love our own children, even to the extent sometimes of pampering them, but we do little to support and integrate young people in our society.
Take something as basic as playgrounds. When visiting Hawick, a Scottish town about the size of Naas, I was struck by the fact that it has six well-maintained playgrounds. In Ireland, residents object to playgrounds because teenagers will hang around there.
Where exactly do we provide for them to go? Our urban streetscapes are designed to keep people moving, except when they are sucked into shops to buy things. If a group of teenagers congregate, before long, some nervous person is bound to call the Garda to move them on.
Irish social life revolves around pubs. We deny them legal access to pubs, and they drift further and further from adult supervision because of the lack of viable alternatives. We often talk about young people as if they were some alien species.
However, they did not create themselves, and the reason that they often make us uncomfortable is because they hold up an unforgiving mirror to our values as a society.
Aside from extremely serious breaches of discipline, there is also a low-level lack of courtesy and inability to focus to be found in many students. Yet once again, they are just reflecting mercilessly the changes in Irish society. Many of us have become too busy either to offer each other the basic courtesies in life or to engage in the endless repetition, and yes, training, that is required for children to acquire manners.
The Report of the Task Force on Student Behaviour in Second-level Schools is a fine document, full of eminently sensible and grounded proposals.
Greater integration of services is emphasised again and again. For example, the taskforce recommended that informal education services such as Youthreach should be expanded to serve younger students and be given greater support.
John Adams is co-ordinator of Killarney Youthreach and current chair of the National Association of Youthreach Co-ordinators. He would be delighted to see Youthreach's contribution recognised and strengthened. However, he confesses that creche owners and primary teachers sometimes tell him that they have future "Youthreachers" sitting in front of them.
This makes him deeply uneasy, because if children are exhibiting behavioural problems or distress that early, surely they should receive help and intervention immediately, rather than waiting for Youthreach to pick up the pieces at 15?
At the moment, schools and other services are like miniature sealed universes, with little contact between them. That has to change, if young people at risk are to receive adequate help, and if their better-behaved peers are not to be short-changed. Schools and informal education settings should be able to draw upon the expertise of other professionals, and the path from formal to informal education settings should have two-way traffic.
At the moment, the numbers returning to mainstream second-level schools from informal settings are painfully small.
However, the family situation is absolutely crucial. Instead of expending vast amounts of money and expertise on young people when they start to exhibit dysfunctional behaviour, it would be far better not only to intervene earlier, but to work in a way to identify and strengthen the family supports that a young person has.
In New Zealand, a conscious decision was made to stop pouring money into costly and often ineffective professional interventions, and to use that money to support family systems to function better. This approach emphasises the strengths rather than the deficits of family groups. Families and neighbours often have untapped resources which can assist young people. John Adams did some research with young people at risk, and when asked to identify sources of support in their lives, not one mentioned a professional. All mentioned family members.
There is a lesson there, which our well-adjusted young people model for us.
When young people are balanced and responsible, they usually have been the recipients of lots of adult care in their families and communities.
Demonising young people is easy. Admitting that it is surprising how many of them still turn out to be fine human beings, given that the pace of adult life often means that we short-change them on time and positive attention, is much harder.