I ended my phone call. It's not usual for a call to leave me feeling confused, baffled and finally outraged. Could it be true? Could my friend have her finger on the pulse or is she a victim of rampant delusional paranoia? Then I turned on the radio, the background to my regular morning routine. My ear quickly tuned to Ryan Tubridy, more specifically his guest, on the phone, he also distressed, confused and outraged. And we are both outraged over the same thing, writes Ailish Connelly.
He is in his 50s, he retrained, he did what he was told he should do, brushed up, upskilled, learnt his lines and . . . nothing. No job, no financial rewards, no upgrades, no walloping through the glass ceiling, no salary hike, no promotion. Nothing.
He had wasted his time. If he was 25, he'd be congratulated on his initiative and his drive and in lickety-spit time he'd be on the other side of the glass ceiling staring back down at the also rans. If he was 25.
Sad thing for him and many like him, is that he would never see 25 again. Sad, not because growing older is a reason to weep into your hanky. We all hope to grow older. Hell, if you aren't getting older, then you are faithfully departed, gone, nada, deceased, on the other side, a "late" person. I'll take getting older while I can.
No, it's sad because it's become a growing phenomenon that if you are unfortunate enough to lose your job, or be otherwise engaged in life, and then want to return to the ranks of the gainfully employed, you are washed up by your late 30s, on the scrapheap by 45 and practically down and out by 50.
Why hadn't he seen it coming? Well, like many a good man and woman before him, he was made redundant. He had no chance to see anything coming. So he thought he had better upskill. Why had he listened to those who said you had to upgrade, get a better life, get ahead? All he had done by retraining, he told Tubridy, was to put himself on the scrapheap. He had sent off more than 100 applications for work and had just two interviews in seven months.
Out of 44 graduates, 41 have work and three are unemployed. The unemployed ones are in their 40s and 50s. The rest are whipper-snapper twentysomethings. He has been told he is overqualified. He feels the real problem is his age. He is both too old and too qualified. Read too expensive. It's far, far cheaper for employers to hire young people, people with far less experience and less expectations and commitments.
It was the "too old" bit which seemed to resonate for most listeners. The show got a flood of calls that morning. Back at the ranch, my friend had waxed long and lyrical about her attempts to get a job. After she too had retrained.
"I can't get onto a masters course, which I'm told I need to progress, without having experience. I can't get experience without having a masters degree. I had to save for my degree and have saved again to go further and I might as well have not bothered, for all the good it's done me."
She feels that if she were a threat to society, ie had a drug problem, or was languishing on some government register for years, then she would be given all the help she needed to get the work experience required to further her career. But she doesn't figure on any list and because she is not a dark statistic to be eliminated to balance up the figures, she gets no help. There is no agency there to help the likes of her. Except a Fás course. And she had done that.
What about the thousands of women like her who want to work again after raising their families? If you have to take time out in your 30s to have kids, and let's face it, it's too late to do it in your 40s, then are you putting yourself out to pasture, because you'll never get near another job when the kiddies have fled the nest.
I tried to soothe her with honeyed phrases of education for education's sake, how there are great benefits to opening the mind to new learning, all witterings on which she poured scorn. "Ask my rear," I was told. "I don't need to prettify my mind, thanks very much. I need a job. But I'm too old." Too old at 42? Surely not.
The phones were hopping in RTÉ. The experience is widespread, it seems. And countrywide. Ageism is thriving. Past it at fortysomething, way past it at fiftysomething and waiting for the thrill of the free bus pass. Hello?
When did this happen? Okay, so it's never been a complete picnic watching the birthdays fall away, with gathering speed as the decades progress. But we've been told for, oh years now, to celebrate the passing decades, embrace them even. Forty is the new 30, and 50 the new 40. Not if you are out there toting your CV around the place, it's not. We've been told to look forward with a thumping great well of positivity. We get wiser as we get older, we have more time, we have time to appreciate the finer things in life, time to smell the roses, so to speak. That's grand and all, but what many unfortunates are smelling is the whiff of isolation, the pernicious pong of "past it".
One brave woman spoke of the struggle to stay sociable when her husband has been out of work for three years. "Friends stay away because they may catch the disease of unemployment." She told of the difficulties of struggling to pay their way, of staying out of awkward discussions about new cars and new holiday homes, of how their phone gradually stopped ringing, how it was hard on everyone in the family, including children. The feeling was that there was obviously something wrong with her husband as there are "loads of jobs out there".
The stories keep coming, about the lack of opportunities for the over 40s, the lack of an agency to deal with the growing body of the middle-aged unemployed. And then on the other hand, we are being told, by the think tank people, Government advisers and the like that we will all be working until well into our 70s. Really? Where?
If we cannot get jobs in our 40s and 50s, then we won't be working into our 70s. Unless it's as the token old person in the firm, jibbering away there in the corner, patronised by the twenty and thirtysomethings. Be nice to the poor old fools, you will be like that some day. They should be very afraid, those young people. Their time will come.
What's shameful are the attitudes. Our collective attitude towards older people. And I'm not even talking about pensioners here. People are not a commodity to be flung aside, like bread well past its sell-by date. Forty and fiftysomethings were 25 once, not so long ago and they too thought they would never be old. But just because they have reached a certain number anno domini doesn't mean they have lost their faculties.
There are many companies who employ older people and they sing their praises, their qualities of patience and tolerance, their experience, their reliability.
Older folks aren't going to be up all night perfecting their horizontal jogging techniques or out on benders. They can get the job done just as well as the young go-getters, so what's with those employers who won't give a 42-year-old a chance? Or give a break to a well-qualified, hugely experienced 50-year-old man?
It's all our faults, indirectly. We've told the whole world for years that we are the young Europeans. We said it so often we believed it wholeheartedly. We continuously ranted on about having the most under 25s in the world and how they were such a great asset. Yes, they were (see Celtic Tiger, run by those now approaching their 40s) and still are.
But - newsflash - 25-year-olds grow up, grow older and still need a job. We have our happening economy and it runs as much on glib image and perception as anything else. We are attached to thinking of ourselves as young and go-getting. Ireland, young, go-getting, on the ball, Europeans. Ireland, cead mile fáilte, and what age did you say you were yourself, there?
What can we do about it? God only knows. There might be a job in there somewhere. And you'd want the patience of Job and the wisdom of Solomon for it. You may even need to be, like the man on the radio say, 50. Go on, give us a job.