Youth

Imagine being turned down after a job interview. Then imagine checking an employment website some time later only to find an ad for that same job, word for word, except for the fact that it is now a "Work Placement Programme"- a job where your only "pay" is a few words on your CV. There are now a range of job advertisements on jobbank.fas.ie offering nine-month, full-time contracts, each declaring that "This is a work placement programme and does not offer a salary."

After my mother, Susie Long, died in 2007 after waiting seven months for a potentially lifesaving diagnostic procedure which private patients were receiving within days at the same hospital I naturally became concerned about the link between income inequality and inequality in health in our society.

Did the organizers stop at nothing for profits?

20 people died in the horrific stampede at the July 24 Love Parade festival in the German city of Duisburg, 500 were injured and, for a time, over 1 000 people were officially listed as missing. The revellers panicked at a tunnel entrance. But, already in the build up to the parade many thought there was a risk of mass panic developing.

The Adeniran family who have lived in Ireland for many years are facing deportation to Nigeria after their High Court bid for asylum failed. A group of Balbriggan school students who attend the Community College with the eldest son, Bola, have come together to fight the deportation and have formed the Friends of the Adeniran Family campaign.

Pieta House, an organisation dealing with prevention of suicide and selfharm, is reporting an increase in the numbers of, particularly young, people, who are considering suicide in the context of the economic crisis.

Pop sensation of the moment, Lady Gaga, has recently topped one billion views of her videos on Youtube. Her new 10-minute music video Telephone is creating quite a stir. The video has been praised as exemplifying “liberated” female sexuality and Lady Gaga herself has been held up in the media, including by feminists, as a “feminist icon and a gender revolutionary” and “a strong symbolic figure… for the openly and secretly flamboyant of all genders and sexualities.”

The government offers this generation of young people three choices for the future; unemployment, emigration or low paid, yellow pack jobs. Since the outbreak of the crisis, young people have been hammered by the government in the form of vicious cuts to education, training and social welfare.

I was always told that if I got a degree, I’d have no trouble finding a well-paid full-time job. I finished college in May, and haven’t been able to find a job, though I have been working part-time in the same pub I’ve been working in since I was sixteen.

The blatant way in which young people were singled out as easy targets in the recent budget was a draconian and discriminatory attack by the government.

THE LACK of justice in the judicial system has been exposed through the draconian sentence given to a 19 year old man for having consensual sex with his 16 year old girlfriend.