The Future

As the economy slides further into a recession, what hope is there for the present and future generations of university students? The UL Collective share their hopes and views of the future ahead.

A procession of black gowns proceed to walk to the front stage. Parents watch from the wings, they watch their children finally complete their official education.

Certificates are given out, caps are thrown in the air. The day of graduation is over.

Once a day of prosperity, a day of hope and a day of looking to a certain future, the day of graduation has changed for many.

The majority of the Irish population in fact.

On my day of graduation, I will collect my certificate, I will throw my cap in the air and I will walk outside onto the green grass of the university, not looking forward to a stable career, a bright and hopeful future, but rather wondering how to survive the next few years financially, how to pay off my student loans and what I will do to get a job to support myself and a possible future family.

With not even enough money to catch a flight to escape to Australia, today’s youthful, educated offspring are waiting in the dole queues outside the local Post Office.

Ireland is known worldwide for its standards in education, people travel from far and wide to assign their children into an Irish school, to achieve the desired education that we are privileged to have.

However, a Leaving Certificate or a First-class Honours degree means little when you are standing on a barren road, facing an uncertain future that promises little to anybody, even the dedicated students who collected their honours degree with satisfaction and pride.

With a failing economy, a dwindling workforce, growing dole queues and quickly closing opportunities, I know I will not be as confident and certain on my day of graduation as my predecessors were ten, fifteen years ago.

People wandered the streets in the recession of the eighties, days were spent watching the new break-dancing crazes or playing with the enticingly difficult Rubix cube, there were no jobs. People in Ireland felt they had failed.

The Celtic Tiger arrived with a roar of achievement, a feeling of success and a stride of confidence. We thought we had it sorted, only to throw it all away in foolish acts of greed, selfishness, stupidity and idiocracy.

We are now faced with a situation twenty times worse than that of the eighties.

My cap will be thrown and certificate will be collected, only to gather my college books, pack them in the attic and make my way down to the local dole queue.

DC.

I am a sports nut. I love every sport. It can be indoor, outdoor, individual or team. If there is competition, I will be drawn to it.

Growing up, I always knew I had a passion for sports, and during my teens, I started to read sports pages, cover to cover during never ending days of rain in a mobile home in Kerry. It was here that I knew I wanted to be a sports “hack”. Things haven’t changed in the last few years. I know now, more than ever that want sports to be my career.

So far, I have enjoyed writing, but I haven’t shut the door on other forms of sports journalism. Being from Limerick, it is clear that rugby is the sport I will find most of my stories in, although controversy is commonplace in Limerick GAA also. I see myself as being knowledgeable enough to write in many different sports, some major sports, while others are far more obscure. As I grew into the idea of doing journalism from reading the likes of Tom Humphries, James Lawton or Hugh Farrelly, I think I would strive to gain the respect among my peers just as they did.

I am not a cocky “know it all” though, and am well aware of my limits, things like horse racing springing to mind instsntly.

For many people, sports don’t matter. But for me, nothing else matters.

NT.

GROWING up as a kid in the eighties, in a family with one parent working and the other staying at home trying to keep the seams from coming apart, it was a meagre existence, but a happy one.

We got by on what came through the letterbox once a month and we kept ourselves entertained without needing money to do so.


These days, everything is about money. Fun is money, life is money, and success is money. Where do the simple pleasures come into it? When did we all become so obsessed with “having”?

I have never had a lot of money. I have never felt the need to have a lot of money. Fair enough, I was a young mother and balancing life was difficult to say the least. I had school, work and a child to support, but I managed.

My child is now 11, and in the last 2 years I have started to worry more and more about my own future and my child’s future. Where do we go from here?

Job prospects are bleak, I am at the stage of my life where I finally want to settle down and build a career for myself, but the chances of that happening here are slim.

The prospect of having to leave Ireland makes me very sad. I love Ireland; I love Limerick and want to stay and build my life and career here where I grew up, to give something positive back to the community.

I am watching my son growing older every day, getting bigger and stronger and smarter and more clued in and it upsets me that he will have to worry about these things in the near future.

As much as any parent wants to keep their child close to them forever, I will be encouraging him, and have already started to do so, to leave this god forsaken island, travel the world and find a place that he can call home, because the way things are now, this is no place to call home.

Will the last one leaving please switch off the lights.

EOB