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A generation fired up

Opinion: Bill Cullen clearly has a lot to learn.

Article by : SpunOut.ie

I tend to make a habit of catching RTE’s Frontline these days. In spite of it being a show named after an area of inherent disaster where various unwitting souls are shown to their deaths, it’s actually a pretty good current affairs programme, dodging both the mind-bending hysteria and frying-pan-to-the-head density that are often the pitfalls of the genre. The presenter, Pat Kenny, has shed the socially awkward albatross he used to have hanging round his neck when doing The Late Late, and he looks and sounds all the better for getting rid of the high levels of lame out of his bloodstream that could well have killed him.

This Monday I was particularly interested in seeing what went on, as the topic was the general malaise affecting young people, especially in relation to unemployment and emigration. As an, eh, enduringly freelance media odd-jobber who’s itching to settle in London, this was obviously a pertinent topic.

Making it even more pertinent though was the presence of Ruairi McKiernan, mentor, SpunOut grand fromage and all round ace guy, articulating what so many of us young, educated and frustrated people are feeling right now. I was rather enjoying the show, until Bill Cullen piped up.

Now I’m sure Bill loves to think that apart from being a one man island industry he’s also a man o’ de pee-opil, so I’m guessing somewhere in his train of thought – which he learned on the streets, don’t ya know - he probably thought he was doing the country a public service by uniformly castigating the whole generation as a bunch of mollycoddled over-educated whiners with no drive or initiative. But he wasn’t, he was just being a tit.

First of all, his whole “get on your bike and look for work” shtick, as if he were Norman Tebbit without the sense of humour, is ignorant at best and smugly simplistic at worst. Those staggeringly qualified people in the audience didn’t get the advanced education Cullen seems so hostile to by being bone idle. If I’m any barometer of feeling, all the young people in that audience are all dying to actually put their skills and talents to practice, not hunting for scraps of poorly paid or voluntary work experience and spending their days throwing out CV’s like those machines that spit out baseballs.

The simple fact is that the job market has quantifiably shrunk, and short of fashioning employment out of clay the opportunities simply aren’t there. And for the opportunities that are there, the competition is beyond fierce. I mean, we could just turn up at a place we’d like to work and force them to hire us on sheer force of personality, but there are laws against that kind of thing.

Not that Bill accepts that or seems to care. One lad, an optimistic and reasonable fellow, accepted Cullen’s premise about the need for a shake-up in attitude but said he had bills to pay he couldn’t ignore, was told he should leave the country if it was necessary to get work, and with it his debts. There were plenty more gems like that, all delivered in his “Sure is that not common sense?” tone.

Exactly where does this man get off? For all his up-by-the-bootstraps talk, his car dealership was damn glad of the government scrappage scheme money they received, and he’s otherwise best known for arsing about on a TV show that’s so hilariously awful it’s just one step up from the lip-wonky Kinder Surprise ads of the late eighties. A TV show, incidentally, based on a format copied and pasted from the UK, which was itself copied and pasted from the US. Presumably he leaves that initiative and enterprise he talks about to other people. 

I only wish it was as easy as Bill Cullen claims it is, but it just isn’t. I wish I could click my fingers and replace Jonathan Ross as host of the BAFTA’s (Lord knows I couldn’t do worse than he did) but it’s a harder slog than that, and that’s fine, it should be hard, but at the minute it’s nigh on insurmountable. Young people today are battling with every nerve and sinew to keep their spirits up, let alone their bank balances, and the last thing we need is a clueless gaum with all the answers, telling us what we’re doing wrong.


By: Paddy Duffy

 

 

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Your Comments

Posted by : Dr. Crane - 09 days ago

Hi Indo, thanks for taking the time to read my article and for your kind words on it first of all. You make a lot of points there, a lot of them I agree with, but to get to the heart of it my intention for this article was simply to call Bill Cullen on his hypocrisy and unhelpful pot-stirring, which is the only function he served on The Frontline. I never claimed to posess a cure for all that ails us in this article, and I don't think young people telling it like it is tantamount to whining necessarily. If it's difficult we shouldn't downplay it or repress it, I tried to allude to that fire in the belly in the article with the conveyor belt of work experience and CV handing and whatnot. I spend most of my days doing either that or flying my own media kites (doing some writing here has been a Godsend) in the name of getting even more experience and keeping active and hopeful, but looking for a job is almost a full time pursuit in itself! Maybe there are people out there too good for menial jobs, but most people would just like to work in the sectors they feel most passionately about and most knowledgeable about. I agree on the government issue, the whole country was asleep at the swtich in 2007, I and others on this site were shouting from the rafters that something bad was coming back then. But getting people excited about the right kind of politics in this time is a very very difficult when the general feeling is they're all tainted somehow.

Posted by : indo83 - 10 days ago

Paddy, Firstly, what a great piece of writing, just short of brilliant. But what is your point? So you attack Bill Cullen, anyone can do that, its like shooting fish in a barrel. As your title suggests, are you part of that generation that is fired up? Have you got a fire in your belly? If so where is this fire? Where is your argument? And more to the point what are you going to do about this fire that you fail to point out anywhere in this article? I logged on to this site after watching the Frontline to see if the youth of Ireland is in fact fired up about anything, and what do I get? A load of waffle that doesn't inspire me, it would barely inspire me to fart, let alone take to the streets with my fellow students who think they have all the answers. All I see on the Frontline is a bunch of young whining about job they can't get and think they are entitled to. There are plenty of jobs out there for the youth of Ireland but it seems that the youth of Ireland are over educated idiots that don't what jobs in the service sector as they are deemed low paid and dirty jobs. further more, as we are a nation of "the middle classes" these jobs that pay bills are not good enough for our highly educated work force, so we go to Australia to do the very same jobs we don't want to do here. This is not to say I like Bill Cullen or what he stands for, but everyone is hung up on job creation, not once was farming and sustainable industries mentioned. Ireland has forgotten where it has come from. I will finish on this: Lets presume that the students and youth of Ireland take to the streets and bring down the Government, what happens then? Are students going to run the country? Most students don't even vote. Are we just going to give taxes breaks to FDI again and let corporations run the country with their neo-liberal views and practices? They and the government has ruined the country in the boom years and they will do it again. Oh, and lets not forget that it was the people of Ireland that voting the government in and didn't object to greedy corporations exploiting our country. Why? Because we were happy and proud of the fact that we were the 2nd richest nation in Europe and the fastest growing economy in the world. Are we proud now? Are we going to allow job creation to be the focal point of this countries problems? Or are we going to say that there is another way to more forward, socially and politically? Let people take to the streets, but lets make sure our purpose is solid and true. Don't waffle about a "fired up" youth and look for praise. You end your piece by saying "Young people today are battling with every nerve and sinew to keep their spirits up, let alone their bank balances, and the last thing we need is a clueless gaum with all the answers, telling us what we%u2019re doing wrong" but what are we doing right? or should I say, what should we be doing to make things right.

Posted by : machholz - 10 days ago

Bill Cullen can talk all he likes but, He has himself brought down the car business by having the highest overpriced services for Renault cars in the country Renault has to be the worst car on the Irish market

Posted by : GallagherWellerBrown - 11 days ago

"Norman Tebbitt without the sense of humour", that's ***ing top.

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