Ireland can be Germark - Village Magazine

December - January 2017 5 1

HAVE BEEN leafing through the Global Youth Devel-

opment Index 2016 published recently by the

Commonwealth Secretariat, London. It deals with

the all-round wellbeing of people aged 15 to 29 in

183 countries inside and outside the Common-

wealth. It measures the general condition of that national

cohort using five criteria: Civic participation, Education,

Employment and opportunity, Health and wellbeing,

Political participation. It awards marks in each category,

totals the marks and provides global rankings. Ireland

is found to be in the Very High group, at number15.

For those of us who wish Ireland well or rather the

best, that is encouraging. People between 15 and 29 are

the critically important part of a population. To have

them in a Very High category of all round wellbeing sug-

gests that a good methodology, mutatis mutandis,

is being used for the younger cohort and

bodes well for the older one. But this

Youth Development Index does more

than compliment and encourage us.

By placing Germany and Denmark

in first and second place respec-

tively in its world ranking, it

supplies us with concrete indica

tions of how we can do better still.

Irish people who want to better

the quality of Irish society go about

this in two ways. They call for more

equality, justice or fairness – values that

it is useful to remind us of, but abstractions.

Others call for the remedy of particular ills that have

arisen such as homelessness, too many people on hos-

pital trolleys or the threat of being taxed for the supply

of domestic water; just demands all of them but made

because the problems in question are topical. They are

not parts of a coherent scheme for overall social

betterment,

That is what the Youth Development Index enables

us to begin working on -by presenting Germany and

Denmark as the two best instances in the world of coun-

tries that afford life-enhancing conditions for

15-29-year-olds. Those two countries are near at hand

so investigation of the social philosophy and institu-

tional arrangements that have won them top marks

would be easy. Equipped with that knowledge, it would

be possible for us to apply it intelligently to that central

15-29-year-old tranche of our population. And the les-

sons learned might also be relevant to the younger and

older components of the nation.

Pursuing this course of action would mean using a

method of national social improvement that has a certain

history. It is the method that pursues that goal by adopt-

ing for the social improvement of one’s own nation

something that has functioned to the benefit of another

people. That is what many nations did when, one after

another, they adopted parliamentary democracy, first

from Great Britain then from the United States, or

adopted the welfare state invented in Germany in the

1850s.

While it is true that various methods are used for meas-

uring the wellbeing of nations, it seems to me that the

method used by the Youth Development Index is particu-

larly useful. Some methods measure the amount of

money available to the nation, say its GNP, or the pro-

portion of citizens who vote in national

elections. The method used by the Youth

Development is more telling.

It measures the use made of social

philosophy, institutional savvy, and

available money to produce benefi-

cial effects in key aspects of the lives

of those persons who constitute the

central, tell-tale cohort of the nation

– those key aspects being Civic par

ticipation, Education, Employment and

opportunity, Health and wellbeing, Polit-

ical participation.

More to the point for useful assessment of

national wellbeing it would be difficult to be. The Irish

researchers in Germany and Denmark would be con-

cerned, firstly, with absorbing the social philosophies

inspiring the two sets of practical arrangements that

enabled those countries to come first in the world in the

Index; secondly, with proposing—insofar as the national

budget would allow—the corresponding institutional

adjustments needed in Ireland.

Of course, it is not the case that Ireland has not previ

ously sought to improve its way of doing things by

importing methods and institutional arrangements from

abroad. However, its method of doing this has normally

been simply to copy English practice, not because that

practice is of outstanding excellence internationally, but

simply because England is near at hand and there is a

post-colonial habit of following its lead. What I am pro

posing is a rationally grounded importation of

well-attested excellence.

Ireland can

be Germark

Ireland can learn Wellbeing from German and

Danish practice on Education, Employment,

Health and Participation

by Desmond Fennell

Global Youth

Development

Index 2016 ﬁnds

Ireland in the

Very High group,

at number 15

OPINION