Harris shows he’s tone deaf when it comes to youngsters

PERHAPS Simon Harris’s desire to get down with the kids through signing up for TikTok, the social network platform favoured by youngsters, could be excused if he used it to announce his plans for how students can return to college after more than a year off campus .

But it’s highly doubtful that the Minister for Higher Education has anything up his sleeve on that score, or any other purpose in mind for TikTok, apart from electioneering and extending his reach to younger people. Fair enough; it’s just a pity he couldn’t wait until the pandemic was over.

It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Harris that for students who have sacrificed more than most to keep the vulnerable safe from Covid, social media is now the mainstay of their lives.

It’s their only way of keeping in contact with their friends. Harris would have shown himself a better ally had he simply left TikTok to the younger generation rather than co-opting it for his own aims.

But that’s the problem – the lack of understanding in Government about how prolonged lockdown is making many youngsters as vulnerable as the ill and elderly people they have helped protect.

Simon, Leo or Simon Coveney – they haven’t an older teenager or young twentysomething between them. Micheál Martin has offspring in Cork but he’s living hundreds of kilometres away in Dublin.

The Green leader Eamon Ryan, with four children in that age group, knows the score but he’s possibly too busy defending himself from attack by party rivals to call for urgent action to reverse arrested development in young people.

Now that most high risk groups are in line for vaccination or have been jabbed, the Government should turn its attention to this other vulnerable group. Many of those who missed a chunk of the most formative years of their lives will catch up immediately and resume life where they left off last March.

But many will not and if they are neglected much longer, the damage to their mental health might be hard to undo and provide the makings of another lost generation.