Irish Examiner view: Generational challenge to put on a happy face

What annoys Helen Mirren the most are patronising comments made by younger people when she holds hands with her husband in public. It is, the hardest part of turning 80

Sat, 30 Aug, 2025 - 01:00

You might think that it is a foolhardy person who would make a condescending remark to the formidable actress Helen Mirren.

She might be in DCI Jane Tennison mode, from the television show Prime Suspect (“just call me guv’nor”), or be the streetwise Victoria, girlfriend of the mobster Harold Shand, in the film The Long Good Friday.

What annoys her most, she said this week, are patronising comments made by younger people when she holds hands with her husband in public. It is, she said in an interview, the hardest part of turning 80.

“If my husband and I are holding hands, someone might say: ‘Oh, look. How sweet.’ It’s like, excuse my language: ‘Fuck off.’ There’s something very condescending about some people’s attitudes. They think they are being kind and generous. But they’re not. They’re being insulting.”

Mirren recalled that her mother told her never to be afraid of getting older, and that there were great things about ageing: You “lose certain stuff, but you gain other stuff”. That’s an inspirational message, and one which chimes with her latest release, The Thursday Murder Club , about a group of people in a retirement home on the track of a killer. And it resonates, also, with new figures this week about the future of Ireland.

The Central Statistics Office (CSO) has issued fresh data, showing that the number of people in Ireland aged 85 and over is projected to almost quadruple in the space of 30 years to 389,400.

The old-age dependency ratio — which expresses the number of people aged over 65 as a percentage of working-age adults — will rise from 25% in 2027 to just under 50% by 2057.

This suggests greater pressures will be placed on the health service in future, as well as the public purse through State pensions, as people live longer.

There are obvious implications in this for a housing sector that is already seriously stressed.

With a consistent increase in the age when first-time buyers are able to get on the property ladder, this makes it more likely that people will still be paying off their debts as they enter their retirement years.

Already, more than 27,000 customers over the age of 65 are still making repayments. A further 17,000 rent from a private landlord, while 36,000 rent from a local authority or a voluntary body.

Small wonder, then, that increased numbers are staying in employment, with 131,400 people aged 65 and over in work in the second quarter of this year, an increase of 26% on the 103,900 in work in the second quarter of 2021.

What these figures don’t tell us is the proportion who are working beyond ‘normal’ retirement age because they want to, or because they are forced to — either through the requirements to service debt, or because of inadequate pension arrangements.

The CSO calculates that one in four people aged 55-69 do not have a pension. The fact that a number of lenders have started to offer mortgages that can be repaid up to the age of 80 is another sign that all is not well in the market.

Whatever the challenges, it appears that a good number of us find more to smile about than swear at.

One in three people aged 65 or over consider that their life satisfaction is high. This drops to 25% for Generation X, Millennials, and GenZers, aged between 25 and 49.

It will be intriguing to see how many people can put on a happy face as the years mount up.

A home is a lively place. It's not a 'machine'

Perhaps it was a matter of coincidence, or good timing, that the Irish Examiner dedicated a page this week to two experts who posed the question: ‘Who are cities for?’ Both bemoaned a lack of impetus in Cork City in stimulating the involvement of citizens in defining the future. Both suggested that such matters were handled with more visionary zip elsewhere — the examples cited were Limerick and Waterford.

“Public participation... is one of the great untapped sources of intelligence and imagination we have,” said Merritt Bucholz, a professor at the School of Architecture and Product Design, University of Limerick.

“The design of our cities,” he added, “is a fundamentally public act. It is not a mystery to be guarded by an elite cadre of experts or technocrats.” The article was published on the 60th anniversary of the death of the Swiss-French designer known as Le Corbusier, who arguably transformed architecture with his modernist theories nearly a century ago.

Le Corbusier — born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret — said he was dedicated to providing better living conditions for the residents of crowded cities, although many of his most famous buildings, 17 of which are World Heritage Sites, are grand designs on an epic scale.

These days, notwithstanding his undoubted impact, Le Corbusier is a problematic and divisive figure. His influence can be seen in diverse projects, such as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, London’s Barbican, and his best-known achievement, the United Nations HQ overlooking New York’s East River.

He is excoriated for links with Vichy France and Benito Mussolini, and alleged sympathies for antisemitism and eugenics.

He famously wrote that “a house is a machine to live in”, which finds an echo in the smart systems that are increasingly a feature of modern developments. But it is unlikely that his prevailing views, which have produced mechanistic tower blocks and inhospitable concrete jungles, will dominate the next century as they have the last.

The contemporary requirement is for lively and mixed residential neighbourhoods on a manageable community scale.

All we have to do now is to get them built.

Which business will end up ruling the universe?

There is barely a day — or a minute in the ephemeral world of social media — without one story or another emerging about the possible society-altering consequences of AI.

From the voracious energy consumption requirements of the data centres on which it depends to the cannibalisation of our creative industries to the rapacious impact on employment prospects for millions of people, there is no aspect of human endeavour which is untouched by a revolution few had heard of even five years ago.

ChatGPT came over the horizon of public consciousness in the autumn of 2022.

Microsoft’s Copilot was launched in 2023, the same year as Elon Musk’s Grok; Google’s Gemini arrived in February 2024.

China’s attempt to level the playing field, DeepSeek, was launched in January.

It is remarkable that we have not yet experienced a full-scale financial crisis when the tech companies have to account for investments about which they have made euphoric claims, but which have yet to produce profits.

Some 95% of companies investing in generative AI have yet to see any financial returns, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Many pension funds are invested in tech stocks, and US president Donald Trump has been a significant supporter of AI’s inroads into corporate life.

Some companies which survived the March 2000 dotcom crash, such as Amazon, have flourished to an unbelievable level. The gamble now is to place bets on the next generation of winners.

AI will most likely be bad for employment rights, with tycoons and tech magnates envisaging it as a means to disempower workers. It is sophistry to suggest otherwise.

Last month, Recruit Holdings, the Japanese parent of Indeed and Glassdoor, cut 1,300 jobs worldwide across its two employment sites. Some 11 jobs at Glassdoor’s Dublin offices are expected to go.

Around 200 jobs from Indeed’s Dublin office were lost two years ago.

The latest reductions are due to a “shift in focus” towards AI. Recruit’s CEO said: “AI is changing the world, and we must adapt by ensuring our product delivers truly great experiences for job seekers and employers.” At the start of Disney’s new series Alien: Earth, the narrator warns that the future depends on which technology prevails — cybernetically enhanced humans, cyborgs; artificially intelligent beings, synths; or synthetic beings into which human consciousness has been downloaded, hybrids. Their struggles will determine which corporation rules the universe.

Clearly the drama has scriptwriters with a taste for extended metaphor.

But they may be more clear-sighted than we are willing to acknowledge.

Irish Examiner view: White House threat to global health research beggars belief