EACH LIVING GENERATION in Ireland has witnessed at least one major failure in governance. My first taste of this was the financial crash.

Beginning secondary school in 2007, I was oblivious to the fact that I was about to receive a political education that was more immersive than any of the Civic, Social and Political Education (CSPE) curriculum’s creators could have conceived. In real time, my CSPE teacher had the unenviable job of explaining the recession to a classroom of working class kids, whose lives were immediately impacted by the financial crisis.

Teachers became interpreters to a generation gripped by a sense of dread that we did not understand, each evening when the Six One news relayed bleak updates in a language we did not speak.

Many of my classmates saw one or both of their parents becoming abruptly unemployed. Grown-ups were all up the walls about pensions and mortgages and things that teenagers did not care about or understand. People were packing up their lives in Dublin to find somewhere they could afford to live in these circumstances. That was the best case scenario, for many. There were innumerable people losing parents and relatives to suicide as a direct result of the crash and the subsequent bailout years.

Much of the suffering was foreseeable, which makes that era particularly painful in hindsight. Government policy set the table for this disaster, to which Ireland had a unique exposure. We were failed and sold out by people who chose wild profits over the long-term well-being of the electorate. The same chain of events brought us to the next generation’s big failure: a housing crisis upheld by policy decisions that limit the supply of housing, fail to deal with........

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