Editor’s letter

This week, for our cover story, Ciara O’Connor makes a plea for a peace pact between the millennials and the rest of us, and suggests that Ireland is uniquely placed to foster intergenerational harmony, because people here actually talk to their grandparents.

The casual dismissal of millennials by my generation is getting tedious. We forget that we were like them once too, and we too were dismissed by the baby boomer generation before us, who were, as they saw it, the last great generation.

Don’t you remember how frustrating it was not to be taken seriously, to have your idealism scoffed at? I think we owe it to ourselves, for our own dignity if nothing else, to perform a graceful and orderly handover of the world to millennials.

The future is theirs. And while we can advise and mentor them and give them the benefit of our experience, just dismissing them as entitled narcissists doesn’t help anything. We need to start getting out of their way and letting them build a world on their terms. And of course they will screw up along the way, but so did we.

Isn’t it time we all tried to stop being depressing, predictable, moany old people, and tried, instead, to look more at all the things that are so admirable about this upcoming generation?

Brendan O’Connor Editor