Séamas O'Reilly: Everyone born in 1998 is now 26 — the bad news doesn't end there

There are hundreds of thousands of young adults in Ireland who will never hire a plumber or electrician, buy a lawnmower, build a shed

A recent report shows 69.9% of 25-year-olds in Ireland live with their parents

The Central Statistics Office released a report on Monday, entitled Growing Up In Ireland. Its parameters were set on the wellbeing, education, employment and economic prospects of Irish people born in 1998. If you’re as thick as I am, you may have read that sentence and wondered, for a few seconds, why the government was so invested in the financial and professional outlook of a bunch of six-year-olds. It therefore falls on me to give you the bad news that everyone born in 1998 is now 26 years old. And, I’m afraid, the bad news does not end there.

There are a few bright spots in the report, which tells us that 59.5% of Ireland’s 25-year-olds have a degree or equivalent qualification, nearly double the EU average. This cohort seem an impressive bunch in other ways, too, with 73% saving on a regular basis, and 58% saying they had been “vigorously exercising” — the report’s own sprightly wording — in the past week. As someone who was neither saving nor exercising very much at all at that age, I can only doff my cap to this generation of fiscally astute athletes fifteen years my junior.