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Spinning out in Europe
Blog: SpunOut.ie youth editor Paddy Duffy goes travelling.
Regular readers of SpunOut.ie might have been thinking over the last months: “I say, what’s happened to that Duffy fellow who used to write here, the man who was always going on about ASBO’s and David Tennant and criticising the government, he’s not dead is he?”
OK, it’s rather unlikely anyone thought that, but just in case you were, I’ve been working the European Youth Conference circuit of late. Seriously. It all started off when I attended a Léargas seminar about continental youth exchanges, and they asked me if I was interested in being Ireland’s young journalist at European Youth Week in Brussels. Needless to say I was on a plane to Belgium by the time the sentence was finished and it was undoubtedly a highlight of the summer.
But that wasn’t it. I started writing for their website, youthweek.eu, and through that came the opportunity to attend the Portuguese EU Presidency’s youth event in Lisbon in September, as a group of three journalists. Crikey, this whole youth journalism thing was getting really interesting! It ran from the 14th to the 17th, and as nice as would have been to treat the weekend as a holiday of sorts, it was off to work pretty soon off the bat. It was my job to do a daily update blog and write cover stories on the different working groups who were working towards a collective resolution to be declared at the end, which will form an important part of future EU policy.
The event was good for some of the very interesting results that came out of it. There seemed to be two schools of thought emerging. Those who had become exasperated at multiple summits and conferences that hadn’t really seen much progress on the ground as a result, and those who thought that these type of things were crucial for establishing links and having the EU onside was a big benefit. It was a terribly interesting experience.
Just a few days after Lisbon I was on my travels again, for what was a thought-provoking few days in London. Along with about twenty others (one being SpunOut.ie’s very own Youth Editor Orla Price) from around the UK and Ireland, I was selected by The Carnegie Trust to take part in an inquiry into the future of Civil Society over the next thirty years.
Thankfully my initial fears that we were selected as some sort of nuclear fallout contingency plan came to naught as we discussed the details of the weekend.
It started off on a conceptual footing (we had a presentation about untangling the future of desire and the future of fate, and how sometimes we imagine the future is affected more by what we want to see than what is realistic…it was fascinating!) We then broke into groups and had great discussions about the issues affecting us in our areas, and then about how we imagine those problems will pan out, and finally how we’d like to see them pan out.
The main thing we learned is that, as you might expect, accurately predicting what might happen years from now is difficult, so there was a lot of emphasis put on what we can do to affect the future positively.
Continental travel notwithstanding, I also got the opportunity to meet some truly great people, and hopefully with continued contact we will be able to have a significant effect on the future, so that this just won’t be a month of good memories.
By: Paddy Duffy
