“There’s no one in government that can relate to a man getting up in the morning knowing that he hasn’t got dinner for his kids,” says Andy Farrell, a Dublin building foreman, to whom this new documentary series very easily relates. An analysis of life today for Ireland’s 25-35 year olds, it interviews some of those most likely to be contending with the aftershocks of the financial crisis, coming of age in a time of depressed wages, a homeless epidemic, sky-rocketing rents and no access to credit. In other words, the “recovery”.
“Every time there’s a price, these are the people who pay it,” says the economist Stephen Kinsella. “These are the precariat.” This three-part programme prefers starker terms, though: This is Generation F’d (RTE2, Thursday, 10.30pm).
Andy is just one of several people we meet, but he anchors director Conor Morrissey’s argument, as a direct descendant of Elizabeth O’Farrell, the nurse who delivered the ceasefire of the Rising. Does the Republic cherish all the children equally, as the proclamation promised, or, as one contributor asserts, do we “top the league table in inequality”? This is less a discussion than a megaphone chant, closer to a rally than a documentary.
Morrissey knows he is unlikely to find much resistance towards his case, but nor does he seek it. We don't get dissenting suits or unsympathetic voices, as we did in The Great Irish Sell Off; no TDs or landlords, for example – who, as trade unionist David Gibney points out, often tend to be one and the same. As such, it's like a furious argument against no opponent.
That’s one of the reasons, I suspect, the programme is so relentlessly stylised. The screen seems to shatter, shudder and glitch, as though caught between a street protest and a communiqué from Anonymous. In the most overused manoeuvre, those people who share stories of frustration, misery or resilience are shown eyeballing the camera as it floats serenely above them, like models in a corporate ad campaign.
Such self-consciousness feels like compensation; as though the show is worried about holding audience interest (it shouldn’t), wallowing in despair (it doesn’t), or waiting out the episode until it finds its true vigour (it might be).
Hence the first episode concludes with a salute to “grass-roots movements” and an increasingly politicised generation. Perhaps the style and content will gel in the next episode, which is primed to fight back. Activism ought to use every new tool that comes to hand.
