A Crisis of Complacency?

Northern Ireland’s youth too detached from European politics to make a difference?

By Feresha Bayramova, Sam Law and Katie Murphy

Of all the most pressing issues in youth politics over the years, the most severe has remained the need to distribute the information and cultivate the concern to mobilise the young to contribute to and participate in the political process.

In addressing such concerns within our own constituency, we’ve decided to embark on a two-part process of our own: firtly interviewing at random a cross section of the country’s youth to gauge the levels and justifications for disinterest (video highlights from which are included here), before presenting what proved to be a worrying statistical representation of general indifference and near wilful excuses that European politics are either too distant or not sufficiently significant to warrant paying attention to to this year’s MEP candidates.





http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CD9VViizrZw&feature=channel_page


So we’ve seen that, predictably, mobilising the youth can be a problem, but how would this year’s candidates defeat such complacency? Do they truly value what youth vote there is? Can the young overcome the old sectarian prejudices to ensure a more streamlined, relevant political process? Or is there simply an inbuilt separation between politics and modern youth culture?

Answers in the days to follow…