It has been interesting, in recent days, to observe the exploration in the British media of the findings of a new survey of attitudes among what is being dubbed the Millennial Generation, i.e., those who will come of age in Britain in the millennium.
The survey of 16 to 21-year-olds, conducted by MORI on behalf of the Adam Smith Institute, hardly revealed anything we didn't already know, but it did perhaps help to focus a number of hitherto slightly impressionistic views of Britain's younger generation based on media images and anecdote.
If we are to believe the survey's findings, the big emphasis in the aspirations of this generation is on money, careers, "risk-taking" and on owning their own businesses. Many of them want to be millionaires by 35. Truly, these are Thatcher's children. But curiously, or perhaps not, these young people are also seemingly hugely unimpressed by politics or politicians. Some 70 per cent believe the way people vote makes little difference.
Although some quite persuasive doubts have been cast on the reliability of these images of youth, there is a core truth in them that is also applicable to this country. We should be deeply concerned, I believe, that young people now regard it as a badge of embarrassment to know the names of senior politicians, and think that indifference to public issues is a measure of sophistication.
I had a most enlightening conversation recently with a journalistic colleague who, being more than a decade younger than I am, might be seen as representative of the generation now coming on stream in Irish life.
He had some strong views on what I write in this column, regarding me as too serious-minded for the 1990s. When I countered that his own work during the 1990s had been characterised by unremitting frivolity, he said it had been a frivolous decade.
There is something in this. The interesting question (here I go again) is why this is so. It is, I believe, a generational issue. As a child of the 1970s - the decade in which I came of age - as well as a member of the first generation since the Great Hunger to grow up in and inherit its own country, I regret to say that I have a natural predisposition towards seriousness directed at the public domain. This, I fully accept, is utterly at odds with present youth culture, in which seriousness is reserved for matters of personal advancement and self-gratification.
It is hardly coincidental that the most significant cultural phenomenon so far this decade has been the emergence of Irish comic voices on a hitherto unprecedented scale. Previously, Irish comedy, as perhaps best exemplified by the Jurys Cabaret phenomenon, was directed towards assisting outsiders to have a laugh at our expense.
In the 1990s we learned that the things we laughed at ourselves could make for an even better comic formula, a discovery that launched a host of careers, including that of the lamented Dermot Morgan.
I do not suggest comedy is necessarily frivolous, but even when it is not, it cannot function as other than light relief, except when accompanied by transformation in the social and political domains. Irish comedy in the 1990s, for all its strengths and strides, was not underpinned by energies which would have used it to bring about significant shifts in societal thinking.
The trouble may be that a revolution of sorts had already occurred. In late 1970s Ireland, when Dermot Morgan emerged, power was already being transferred from the pre-1960s to the post-1950s generation. And although this latter generation still holds to power, it does so most disingenuously. Its technique has been to pretend it never won power at all, but is still fighting a rearguard action against the forces of darkness. Thus, the Catholic Church, de Valera's Ireland and any form of nationalistic expression became the straw men whose demise would mark the onward march of the revolution of Modern Ireland.
I believe that this was the fundamental problem with Dermot Morgan's pre-Father Ted attempts to reinvent Irish comedy. Driven by a profound artistic craving to address fundamental truths, he was also misled by the background noises created by the 1960s generation's attempts to disguise the fact that it was the power in the land.
It wasn't until Graham Linehan and Arthur Matthews provided him with a script not paralysed by neurosis that Morgan expressed his true genius.
The 1960s generation seized power by unseating the "traditionalist" incumbents and maintained its hold by perpetuating a war against largely phantom notions of conservatism and reaction.
The 1970s generation, to which Dermot Morgan also belonged, was largely sidelined, at most granted bit-part participation in the society, and this only on strict condition that we would not question the ruling orthodoxies.
It is often said, usually by politicians, that the young Irish people of today, the product of the last baby-boom of the late 1970s, would be the most self-confident, energetic, passionate and positive generation to be born on the island for about 800 years.
But I would say that the 1990s generation in Ireland has little or no sense of Ireland as a nation or a community, but only as a locus of economic citizenship, work and recreation. Unlike their immediate predecessors, these young people intend to stay in Ireland; but they do not intend to get involved, other than to the extent of participating in the economy. This is not so much Generation X as Generation Zzzzzz.
The alleged frivolity of 1990s Ireland has been a kind of ironic sour grapes to conceal the sense of hurt generated by the failure of the generation in power not merely to hand over power to younger generations but even to hand on any sense of citizenship, patriotism or indeed any sense of communality.
As a result, the obsessions of our millennial generation appear to relate mainly in the consumption of drugs and the mockery of the past, usually in the form of parodying bad television programmes of the 1960s (see @lasttv on Network 2).
At first glance it seems strange that British and Irish societies appear to be heading towards the same point from two different directions. Although the 1960s generation has been in total control here for some time, it never really achieved power in Britain, where small- and big-c conservatives held sway until the election last year of perhaps the first government in Europe dominated by the 1970s generation.
It is remarkable, too, that while Irish society reached its present state by denigrating the past, Mrs Thatcher brought Britain to the same point by extolling the values of tradition in an utterly uncritical manner. But on second glance it's not odd at all. Both societies essentially just followed the money.