Alcohol and drug abuse, suicide and the need to restore traditional family values, are some of the main issues young people will have to confront in the coming years, according to a conference held yesterday.
Young people who grew up since the 1990s are a "disconnected generation" who live a "monocultural existence", Prof Tom Collins, of NUI Maynooth, told a national student conference organised by the Céifin centre and hosted by the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology.
The Céifin centre, based in Shannon, Co Clare, promotes "values-led change" in society.
Prof Collins said that in modern Ireland the family provides less and less for the needs of its members than it did formerly, and less interaction between family members leads children to become docile and non-involved in later life.
Encouraging the need for more active citizenship and a return to more traditional family values, Prof Collins said there was a need for the modern child to "make things happen rather than have things happen to them".
Students at the conference were presented with a video by Séamus McGuinness, 21 Grams, which was filmed to encourage awareness and discussion about suicide. The title refers to the reputed decline in weight in the human body at the precise moment of death.
Mr McGuinness, an AdAstra scholar in suicide studies at UCD, said there was a "vacuum of knowledge" with regard to suicide in Ireland.
Paul Kelly told delegates how he set up the charity, Console, after the death of his younger sister through suicide over four years ago at the age of 22. The group provides professional counselling and support to those bereaved through suicide.
Last year 431 people died through suicide, while about 11,000 people are treated for incidents of deliberate self-harm each year. Mr Kelly and Mr McGuinness said there was a need to de-stigmatise mental health and suicide in Ireland if these figures were to improve.
The Governor of Mountjoy Prison in Dublin, John Lonergan, said many people had an ill-informed opinion about crime and that proposed solutions to it were often too simplistic.
He said it was worrying that there had not been much public debate about the proposed new prison at Thornton Hall, and that it was being developed "without any reference to research".
Mr Lonergan emphasised the huge extent to which social conditions contribute to crime and said it was no coincidence that the majority of people in prison come from socially disadvantaged areas. He said 75 per cent of all Dublin-born prisoners come from six black spot areas.
Only 6 per cent of those in prison stayed in school past the age of 16, Mr Lonergan added.
Among some of the solutions suggested by students to the issues raised at the conference included an emphasis on education, parenting, a focus on family values, investment in mental health, alcohol-free nightclubs and more facilities for young people.