There are concerns Ireland’s young people a missing out on “important rites of passage” as a result of coronavirus restrictions.

Earlier this week, Fianna Fáil Senator Malcolm Byrne told the Seanad that the last thing young people want to do is “sit at home with their mam and dad watching television.”

He said the freedom people of his own age experienced when they were younger was important for their development.

“They want to be out,” he said. “It was when we were going to nightclubs and, yes, getting the shift, getting into a relationship, learning about ourselves.

“They are all things that make people smile but they are important rites of passage and we are in danger of, for a whole generation of young people, losing all of that.”

Time

On Newstalk Breakfast this morning, Trinity Professor of Sociology Dr Evelyn Mahon said that, while young people are the group that “feel most disadvantaged by the pandemic,” the reality is they don’t have it that bad.

“When you are that age, a year is a very long time,” she said. “I keep on saying to young people, when you are that age, you think a year is everything but when you look back at it at my age, a year is nothing.

“So, I think they are experiencing it, even though when you put their lives in a comparative context, I don’t think it is that bad.”

COVID generation

She said today’s young people will be known as the COVID generation and insisted they will have learned a lot from the experience.

“There is huge awareness of climate change and they have, many of them, been brought into adult issues at a much younger age,” she said.

“That is tough on them but also, it will build up their resilience. I think it will, in many ways, help them in the future.

“A lot of the earlier viruses, things like Polio, affected children young people disproportionality. This hasn’t been the case with them.”

Impact

Also on the show, SpunOut Deputy Director Jack Deacon said young people’s feelings are “valid and relevant” and people should be careful not to minimise the impact of the pandemic on them.

“We did a really large survey across Ireland of how young people have been impacted by COVID-19 in the last few months,” he said. “And 99% said they had been challenged in some way.

“So very, very few people said they had not faced some sort of challenge and one-in-ten were unable to name any positives at all from the last few months.”

“So that is an indicator of how they are feeling and how their lives have been impacted.”

He said young people began the year expecting to move into the same college experience their older peers had enjoyed.

“They had been built up for that,” he said. “So, I think this new change, this new college life has made what is already a difficult transition more challenging.”