John Lahart (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

When the evaluation of the period of Covid gets under way, young people, in fairness to them, will have more questions to ask than any other age cohort, and justifiably so. When they look at the restrictions put on their lives, they will have the most questions to ask. What is interesting with regard to what some of the previous speakers have said is what we would have done without social media over the past two years. We can decry it and deride it and it has serious downsides, but I wonder how our young people would have survived without the ability to interconnect that social media provides. I am not downplaying its downsides or its negatives. The Minister of State should consider instituting a young person's citizens' assembly. It ought to become a regular feature of Irish life and an annual occasion where young people get to tell us what they think rather than us articulating what we think they think. It should be instituted quickly.

An issue I have felt very strongly about for a long time is that there should be a gap year between the ages of 18 and 25. Students should be able to exercise an option to take this and the State could provide meaningful alternatives to college, apprenticeship or work for that period. Those young people could choose to do whatever they wanted to do that year but we should facilitate them taking a year out. I use as an example people I know. Many of them graduated from a college course that was not the first course they began. They discovered after a year what they were doing was not what they wanted to do and that they wanted to do something else. We owe this to them. Over the period of the ages 18 to 25 young people should be able to take a year out to de-stress and see the world. They should be able to take time out to consider and reflect on their future and what they might be able to do. These are two practical suggestions I can give the Minister of State.

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