Abstract
In 1966 Radió Telefís Éireann, the Irish national public service television station, broadcast a programme about teenagers entitled The Young Ones. Hosted by investigative journalist Michael Viney,1 the programme addressed youth clubs and featured a teenager named Tina:
Tina is just sixteen — a slim … pretty girl who is used to working in back-lane factories, who lives with her mother in a Corporation flat and dreams about the Beatles. Twice a week she goes dancing at St. Dominic’s Girls’ club — and wishes there were more ‘fellas’ to make the club even better. We adopted Tina as a guide to the life and surroundings of the ‘young ones’ who grow up in the heart of commercial Dublin. Through her eyes, we began to see just how grey and dispiriting the back streets of the capital could be … we began to realise just what a youth club could mean in these anonymous — and often very ugly wilds of central Dublin.2
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Notes
Michael Viney wrote for the The Irish Times and produced a number of series on social issues in the 1960s and 1970s, including mental health, unmarried mothers, marriage breakdown and the institutionalization of children. For examples see John Horgan (ed.), Great Irish reportage (Dublin: Penguin Ireland, 2014);
Michael Viney, The broken marriage: A study in depth of a growing Irish social problem (Dublin: Irish Times, 1970);
Michael Viney, Mental illness: An inquiry (Dublin: Irish Times, 1971).
Michael Mitterauer, A history of youth (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 209–2.
Kenneth Roberts, Youth and leisure (London: Allen and Unwin, 1983), 11.
Christine Griffin, Representations of youth: The study of youth and adolescence in Britain and America (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), 11;
Jon Savage, Teenage: The creation of youth, 1875–1945 (London: Chatto and Windus, 2007), 66–73.
Rosemary Wakeman, ‘European mass culture in the media age’ in Rosemary Wakeman (ed.), Themes in modern European history since 1945 (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 150.
Bill Osgerby, Youth in Britain since 1945 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 26–7.
Arthur Marwick, The sixties: Cultural revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c.1958–c.1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 43.
The minimum school leaving age was fourteen years while the average marriage age declined throughout the decade. Paul Ryan describes how the mean age of marriage fell from 30.6 to 27.2 years for men and from 26.9 to 24.8 years for women during the period 1961 to 1973. See Paul Ryan, Asking Angela Macnamara: An intimate history of Irish lives (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2012), 17.
For more on the significance of youth as representing the future of the nation in this period see Carole Holohan, ‘More than a revival of memories? 1960s youth and the 1916 Rising’ in Mary Daly and Margaret O’Callaghan (eds), 1916 in 1966: Commemorating the Easter Rising (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2007).
Kevin Rockett, Irish film censorship: A cultural journey from silent cinema to internet pornography (Dublin: Four Courts, 2004), 149.
Peter Martin, Censorship in the two Irelands, 1922–1939 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006), 48.
T. R. Fyvel, The insecure offenders: Rebellious youth in the welfare state (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961), 27.
Tony Jefferson, ‘Cultural responses of the Teds’ in Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson (eds), Resistance through rituals: Youth subcultures in post-war Britain (London: Routledge, 2006), 67–70.
William S. Bush, Who gets a childhood? Race and juvenile justice in twentieth-century Texas (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 138.
Rev. Dermott O’Neill, ‘Urban youth problems’, Christus Rex, 14:4 (1960), 267–74, 273–4.
William Kvaraceus, Juvenile delinquency: A problem for the modern world (Paris: UNESCO, 1964), 18–19.
Alexander J. Humphreys, New Dubliners. Urbanization and the Irish family (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 202–3.
Voluntary Organisations’ Joint Committee, Vandalism and juvenile delinquency: Report of joint committee appointed at the request of the Lord Mayor of Dublin (Dublin: n.p., 1958), 6.
Hilary Pilkington, Russia’s youth and its culture: A nation’s constructors and constructed (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 38–9.
Eamonn Dunne, ‘Action and reaction: Catholic lay organisations in Dublin in the 1920s and 1930s’, Archivium Hibernicum, Irish Historical Records, 48 (1994), 107–18, 115.
Deirdre McMahon, ‘John Charles McQuaid: Archbishop of Dublin, 1940–72’ in James Kelly and Dáire Keogh (eds), History of the Catholic diocese of Dublin (Dublin: Four Courts, 2000), 353.
John Feeney, John Charles McQuaid: The man and the mask (Cork: Mercier Press, 1974), 43, 77.
Maurice Curtis, A challenge to democracy: Militant Catholicism in modern Ireland (Dublin: History Press Ireland, 2010) 161–4.
Lindsey Earner-Byrne, Mother and child: Maternity and child welfare in Dublin, 1922–60 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 92–3, 123.
Mary Purcell, Catholic Social Service Conference, golden jubilee, 1941–1991 (Dublin: Catholic Social Service Conference, 1991), 12–24.
Traditionally, members of a sodality were of about the same ‘age, sex, occupation and condition in life’ resulting in separate sodalities composed of women, students, working men etc. This helped the spiritual director adapt his instructions to the needs of the sodalists. Hymns were sung and announcements of church events were made at the monthly or weekly sodality meeting. This was followed by a short conference on subjects touching the spiritual progress of the sodality. See T. I. Mulcahy, The sodality manual: Official manual for the sodality of Our Lady in Ireland (Dublin: Irish Messenger, 1934).
For more details on McQuaid’s attempt to foster a system of youth sodalities in his archdiocese see Carole Holohan, ‘John Charles McQuaid and the failure of youth sodalities, 1956–61’ in Colm Lennon (ed.), Honouring God and community: Confraternities and sodalities in modern Ireland (Dublin: Columba Press, 2012), 126–47.
See Carole Holohan, ‘A conduit to a baneful modernity? Church responses to youth culture, 1956–73’ History Review, 15, (2005), 73–86.
The Dublin Institute of Catholic Sociology was located first in Gardiner Street and later in Eccles Street in Dublin’s north inner city. Established by McQuaid in 1950 the institute provided adult education courses on the church’s social teachings. See Brian Conway, ‘Foreigners, faith and fatherland: The historical origins, development and present status of Irish sociology’ in Sociological Origins, Special Supplement to Volume 5:1 (2006) 5–36, 16.
Although it was suggested that the Diocesan Girl Guides might be able to supply some suitable female recruits to work in girls clubs, this does not appear to have materialized in any formal capacity, although girls were admitted to the ranks of the Corps in 1972. See Fr Fehilly to McQuaid, 30 Mar. 1962 (DDA, McQuaid Papers, AB8/b/XXVIII); J. Anthony Gaughan, Scouting in Ireland (Dublin: Currach Press, 2006), 125.
John R. Gillis, Youth and history: Tradition and change in European age relations, 1770–present (New York and London: Academic Press, 1974), 140; Roberts, Youth and leisure, 11.
Anne V. O’Connor and Susan M. Parkes, Gladly learn and gladly teach: Alexandra College and School, 1866–1966 (Dublin: Blackwater, 1984), 75.
Desmond Bell, Acts of union: Youth culture and sectarianism in Northern Ireland (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Education, 1990), 37.
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Holohan, C. (2015). A Powerful Antidote? Catholic Youth Clubs in the Sixties. In: Cox, C., Riordan, S. (eds) Adolescence in Modern Irish History. Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230374911_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230374911_9
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