Today’s teenagers - A confident, optimistic generation

IT IS reassuring if not inspiring to know that, as banks are being bought up like the cheaper paintings at a minor charity auction, that 95% of Irish teenagers believe that they lead “a happy, meaningful life”.

This either shows an astounding resilience to the great economic events unfolding all around us or that they believe they are bulletproof. However, those polar opposites may be reactions from a different time; it seems today’s Irish teenagers are confident, energetic, undaunted, outward-looking and, despite everything the modern world can use to distract them, four out of five of them still put family before friends.

Today’s Irish Examiner/MRBI poll shows that they are indeed Celtic tiger cubs and regard the whole world, every last corner of it, as their oyster.