Lynn Ruane (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I do not think I need to formally second the amendment No. 1 but I echo the support for it and for what Senator Hoey said regarding the PUP and SUSI. I am already getting many emails about young people being pushed out of university because they cannot stay on their SUSI payments. The latter is unintended of Covid-19 which needs to be remedied quickly.

When I think about young people, it is such a big subject. How does one begin to talk about young people? I always need to take it back to who I was as a young person and the young people with whom I identify most.Usually, it is the young people who are right at the back of the line. I try not to sound overly pessimistic - I do not know whether I achieve that - when opportunities arise to talk about new initiatives, new funding or an increase in the number of people who want to go to university. It is very hard for me not to look out my bedroom window at my community, knowing that even with the greatest will and intention, often no amount of intervention will reach those who need it most and who are furthest from the system. Those are the young people who are usually at the forefront of my mind in anything I do as a politician, such as working on spent convictions, drug possession or crime.

The young people I advocate for, and for whom I want to advocate even more, are often those society deem as problematic, as criminals or as causing a problem beyond antisocial behaviour. Antisocial behaviour is probably a bit too light a term for what I am referring to. At some point in those young people's lives, they were not considered to be the same thing they are seen as when they hit 16, 17 and 18. When they were two years old, they might have been considered people in a vulnerable position or young children or families that needed support. At some point when they get older, poverty, deprivation and lack of access manifest themselves in the world as an outward behaviour that the rest of society can see, and they then become known as something else, whether that is as criminals or some other very classist words that I will not use. People might think that they just do not care or that they are violent. I do not know how much people know about childhood trauma but it can manifest itself as violence. Hurt people hurt people.

I would never suggest for a moment that we should not hold people accountable to try to help curb their behaviour, but when we look at young people and talk about their involvement in criminality or violence, we cannot separate them from their history. We keep separating young people from who they were two or four years previously, or when they were born, and then we separate their parents from their own history. Parents who have not had access to education or employment and do not know how to read information, search forms or understand what their doctor is saying do not all of a sudden know all those things when they become mothers. They do not suddenly know how to create a completely different life for the child they are after having. They are still that same person with that same lack of opportunity and the same lack of ability to advocate for themselves. People online often say "Where are the parents?" or "I blame the parents" but those parents were the same children all the previous Governments talked about. This is an intergenerational issue and we are failing people in their thousands. We often do not speak up for some of these people because they may also behave in very problematic ways, such as becoming robbers or being violent or so on. It all intersects.

I wrote my dissertation on the moral significance of class and poverty. I researched the philosophy behind all of it and the biggest thing I learned was that, while we are busy striving and talking about a republic of opportunity and equality of opportunity, there can never be equality of opportunity if the floor on which we are all standing is not the same. Opportunity means nothing if our environments do not look like each other. If my environment does not look like the next person's and theirs does not look like the next's, opportunity is meaningless and empty. We need to strive for young people, whose disposable income is now 16% less than it was in 1987. Young people now are experiencing a different type of inequality with the standard cost of living having gone up. We need to create a society where we all have the same social floor. What people do from there is up to them, but they should never fall below a certain point. There are too many people below that floor right now and that is what we need to fix.