My name is Lear McKeith. I'm 23 years old and I was born and raised in Belfast City.
When I was 8, the country reached a new agreement that was going to promise peace and prosperity to my generation.
We were on the cusp of a new era, not just a peace but a prosperity.
We were going to take our place in the global economy and investment was going to flood in and young people like myself were going to grow up and enjoy buying those opportunities.
And certainly some are thriving. Chris Hughes is one of the success stories. He's a young entrepreneur from West Belfast and he's just set up a new business, the enterprise factor.
It's a six-week training programme for schools where students in the schools are trained up in finance, marketing, operations and their challenge is to stage a charity fund raising concert in their school featuring someone from either X-factor or Britska talent.
They come into the school and perform the event. The young people have to sell tickets, they have to sell merchandise, they sell sponsorships, they sell all the different things and they have to generate a profit that goes to a good cause.
And that's the business now. We are currently sitting in a crazy position, far more demand for our service than we can actually supply.
So, good news and that's what we're doing now.
But not everyone is flourishing right now. When we talk about youth unemployment you'll often hear the word NEAT standing for not in education, employment or training.
I spoke to Trisha McGee of Wave Trauma Centre who works with NEATS. She explained to me how difficult it is to get these young people into work.
Well, I suppose when young people talk to me about the economy, although that's not what they would call it, how they, I suppose the issues I see presenting with the young people we work with, it would be around, very much around lack of hope in the future, lack of direction,
battling, I suppose, week to week budgeting, money, where they're going to live, housing's a big issue for a majority of our young people. I would say a lot of young men who would feel very disenfranchised and very isolated in terms of having any hope for actually being able to play a part in society,
an economic part in society. Finding work just isn't an option, there just is no work for them to find or that's how they see it.
The government is promoting back-to-work schemes as a way of combating rising youth unemployment. Are the companies involved just taking advantage of the programme to gain free labour?
Well, I'm Daniel McCawley, I'm 21 and at the minute I do a staffs to work placement in a music shop. I really wanted to do something within the music community so they thought let's put them in placements where they can get that sort of experience.
So I applied to be in a Christmas temp and they were coming up in December and I had been asking them since October, they didn't hire me because I was already going to be there through Christmas anyway, working for them for free. If you're going to have someone there who's working for you and who's actually good at the job and actually wants to learn more but you don't hire them, what's the point really?
It's not just the so-called needs who are struggling to find work. Brian John Spencer is a writer and blogger. He told me about how he struggled to find work even though he has a law degree and a master's. Part of the problem, he says, is the society's belief that a degree equals a job, which for this generation doesn't.
I just grew up in Belfast and did the whole conventional status quo upbringing. I went to primary school, got my 11th class, went to grammar school, got my GCSE, ASA2, was told to do law, law and medicine, even though I loved art. Did the whole four year thing.
Graduate couldn't get a job because they needed experience, so I did what I knew best, went back into university for another year to do a master's, came out against it, couldn't get a job and I felt, I did internships, I felt the searing pain and the endless misery of youth unemployment.
I think of this belief that people have to go to university. I call it the cult of university. If you don't go to university, it's like a rung down in that ladder, and I felt that. It was just, I couldn't not go. You had to go.
A lot of the stories you've heard on camera today focus on unemployment, but those aren't the only issues affecting my generation. Education, debt and housing are all causing difficulties. Now, there isn't a straightforward explanation and there's definitely not an easy solution.
But we need to make sense of these problems if we are to overcome them, not just as individuals, but as a society and as a generation. The conference today offers a starting point in that conversation.
Thank you.
