Mr. Ivailo Kalfin:

I thank Deputy Calleary for the questions. I will be very brief in answering them. Looking at the age groups, the optimism among young people in Ireland is a bit lower than the other age groups. At the same time, the level of optimism in Ireland overall is much higher than in other EU member states. We see the same phenomenon across Europe in that young people are a bit less optimistic because they have a number of challenges. I mentioned already that they were particularly hit by this Covid crisis before they had recovered from the previous crisis. They face challenges with job security, access to housing and career prospects.

We have done extensive research on teleworking and remote working and I was surprised to learn that young people have the most stress when working remotely. Normally, young people are much more familiar with all the technologies etc. but the problem is that they do not feel part of the community at work. They are not secure in how their work is appreciated and they do not know what their career development will be. Many of them have small children to raise at home and teleworking creates additional problems there. All of these factors impact both optimism and mental health and create psychosocial risks for young people. Young people are resilient but we have to take into consideration that this crisis has created higher stress levels for them and they have to cope with those stress levels. That is very clear in our research.

On the European Year of Youth, I cannot agree more that it has to be more visible. The idea of the European Year of Youth is to see and spotlight the problems of young people. Eurofound is known across Europe as the Dublin foundation. We are based in Ireland and we try to be helpful to our host country and the institutions. We will be active on Europe Day on 9 May and will host an open-door day. Everybody is invited, including the committee members and people from their constituencies. We already have some agreements with young people from universities. We want to be able to present more information about young people across Europe, not only in Ireland. Of course, the information and data we are collecting are entirely at the committee's disposal. Whenever any members would like to have some more information, we would be more than happy to provide it.