A huge issue with the youth of Northern Ireland that I’ve come to realise over the length of not only this project, but over the last few years, is that they’re just not overly interested in the goings-on of our politics. Whether that’s because they don’t understand it or they don’t realise how important it is, it’s an issue that needs to be addressed.
Although punks don’t typically support any kind of government, I’m not trying to be a punk, or claim that my zine is a punk zine, but rather inspired by the aesthetic and most of the things they stood for. Most of all I’ve taken inspiration from the fire they had to make a stand against what they disagreed with, as like I’ve said, I think Northern Ireland could do with some of that in the present in order to bring about a faster change.
With an election coming up, many are targeting the youth, as we’ve been known to not get involved with voting, and as stats suggest, if we all voted and stopped the ‘one person won’t make a difference’ mentality, we genuinely could swing the results in a positive way. Soon we will outnumber the traditional older generation, and we can create a country we can be proud of.
So, I want to include a strong message to tell those who have been until now “politically passive” to get up and do something, whether that’s vote or to educate their friends or even protest. I’ve also decided on a name for my zine, “The Middle Ground.” I believe it describes those in political terms who don’t really take a side, but it actually came from a conversation about being Protestant or Catholic, and the fact that there’s more and more of us who don’t care much about whether your’e one of the other, we’re the middle ground. This is my target audience, the youth that probably have an opinion on politics or social issues like equality, but that haven’t done anything about it. The tagline for the zine will be, “The cure for political passiveness.” It has a punky ring to it, while describing what the zine’s about.
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time to change 