Not one to stay still for too long, the next chapter of my life is now planned. Much to many people's confusion, myself and the girlfriend have decided to travel to Seoul to teach English. The more I think about it, the more I'm happy with the decision, although it does seem a bit crazy. My impression of people who went to Asia to teach was generally negative, basically unemployable people who had no other options. But here I am, and I'm really looking forward to it.

Since getting back to Dublin, I've had so many interesting conversations about the state of Ireland at the moment, it does get a bit depressing, I rarely hear a positive word about it, but there are some positives. The worst thing is seeing people having to constantly reassess their goals and ambitions. The best part of youth is that there is a belief that anything is possible, a belief that success will come with hard work, but an understanding that everything will work out and the perfect future lies ahead of us. The people who were supposed to be our future stars have been beaten down in the last year or two, Ireland should be known as the land of bastards and begrudgers sometimes. I was talking to a young Irish fashion designer last week who finally had that realisation that she was going to get off her ass and start to pursue the work she dreamed of doing. She handed in the letter of resignation to her job that morning, had a cover shoot in the pipeline for a major newspaper and wanted to open her own boutique. Most of all, she was finally happy and she felt free. Someone like that needs support from everyone, we need to get behind our young talented people and make sure they achieve greatness and are not stuck in dead end jobs.


There is the debate about young people holding out for a career they would be happy in. I had it last night with someone who knew he could get anyone a job in two weeks, and really disagreed with people on the dole. The Irish Times also had an article on this last week about lower end jobs that the Irish are not happy to do. I don't really worry about people holding out for the right job, it is their life and if they are happy with what they do, they will happily work harder, be promoted, earn more and contribute more in taxes to account for what they took from the economy while unemployed. And in the case of the fashion designer, she is theoretically creating more jobs and so she should have the utmost support from the government, the banks and her peers. If we are supposed to become a land of entrepreneurs, we'll have to at least start pretending soon enough, there are so many young people out there who want to know that it will be safe to embark on their own adventure and to know that we will all support them.

I didn't end up going to the interview, it would have been cheap of me to go there with no intention of working for them. I don't believe that they (XR Marketing) are a scam, I just think they prey on people who can't find work, targeting recent graduates and promising new recruits fast promotion within the company. There is plenty of unethical practice going on out there and plenty of desperate individuals who are susceptible to fall into the trappings of this type of employment.

So what should young unemployed people do? Unfortunately, here in Dublin for example, it is very expensive for a company to employ a person and more expensive to train a recent graduate. Considering the number of positions are still declining, it seems like an impossible task for most graduates to find work. What can be done? Workfare programmes in Ireland have been tried in the past and have generally been badly run and have cost more money to run than plain social welfare, but it was reported last month that Éamon Ó Cuív, Minister for Social Protection seeks to try and expand on these programmes, hinting at mandatory workfare programmes. The Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) have strongly opposed this plan and so political movement in this direction has been slowed. I understand both sides, the government really feels it needs to tackle the problem of rising unemployment and emigration, and they feel that its best served by trying to expand on programmes that have essentially been in place for years, but ICTU know from experience that these programmes did not work in the past and will probably only be beneficial to a minority of people.

The actions I would like to see would be for money to be invested into simple grassroots movements, where people can share their free time while they look for employment. They should be free to donate as little or as much time as they can, but we need a well developed central forum for this. A positive example comes from Portland, Oregon. A small group of people started a blog called wevegottimetohelp (now http://wevegottimetohelp.org/) which was basically a few people who had some extra time due to being laid off or were looking for work and were happy to donate their time and skills to the community. I know so many talented people with a lot of time and energy on their hands who could do so much help so it might be a good idea to start a WGTTH chapter over here and rebuild the country from the base up. Not only could we give a helping hand to those who are struggling the most, we can give real world experiences to young graduates who are our future leaders and policy makers.