Talking recently about his new book, Tickling the English, the comedian Dara Ó Briain remarked that he’d noticed a difference in the way we and our nearest neighbours view our children. While the English tend to despair of their teenagers and berate them as drunken, hoodie-wearing, Asbo-effect hooligans, we have a far more rosy perspective on our greatest resource.

Pope John Paul II may have started the trend in 1979 when he came to Galway and announced, “Young people of Ireland, I love you,” Ó Briain reckons, but for whatever reason, the Irish take a distinctly benign and indulgent attitude to the follies and antics of youth. We’ll tell them they’re great, he says, and they’re lovely and sure, aren’t they only having a bit of fun?

He may be on to something. How else, after all, do you explain the Grimes twins? Not just their bulletproof self-confidence, but more remarkably the fact that the adults in their lives apparently never had the heart to point out to them that they can neither sing nor dance. Either the whole family have Van Gogh’s ear for music, or else these adults consciously shelved their own reservations and urged the lads to pursue their delusions. Which is kind, but hardly very responsible.

The twins’ choreographer on The X Factor has said they remind him of a child who has drawn a terrible painting yet none of the grown-ups can bear to tell him it’s a dud. Sooner or later, though, somebody always will. Being cute and blond twins, they’ve probably spent their formative years bathed in the warm glow of adult esteem and indulgence. You just don’t get to a point where you can audition for a talent show with an audience of millions, and put yourself forward for the most brutal and most public rejection, unless you’ve grown up believing you’re great and you’re lovely, that complete strangers admire you unconditionally and all adults are charmed by the chance to make you happy.

And that’s what makes them so likeable, however much you might set out to scorn them. They have a palpable expectation of goodwill and good fortune. They expect, and believe, that life will be kind to them, that they can be famous pop stars if they wish, and that a little hitch such as being unable to sing needn’t hinder that dream.

Happiness is said to be the ability to live fully in the present without regretting the past or worrying about the future, and the boys, surviving week to week at the voters’ whim, are living proof of that. But a study published last week suggests that, far from being unique, the Grimes twins’ good spirits are actually pretty typical of the majority of Irish children.

The survey was taken at the height of the boom in 2006, and compared 20,000 schoolchildren between 11 and 15 in the UK and Ireland — the peer group of the Grimes boys, who turned 18 last month. It found that Irish children were happier and healthier than youngsters in the UK, reporting good health, positive body images and general life satisfaction. It will be interesting to see whether the next survey, to be carried out in 2010, will find any change. The recession is certain to affect the youngsters’ reports of mood levels and general contentment, as children of that age group are usually quite sensitive to adult dispositions and domestic atmospheres.

But in recent years, surveys such as this one, carried out by NUI Galway in collaboration with the World Health Organization, have been fairly consistent in finding high levels of happiness in young Irish people. Similar research conducted in 2005, for example, found that Irish teenagers had more friends than their peers in any of the other 34 countries surveyed, that 90% were happy with their lives, and most were fitter than their counterparts abroad.

Some commentators have speculated on a link between the children’s happiness and the fact that some 80% in this country were living with both parents, compared with a figure of 70% for the UK. But a deeper analysis of the results suggests that it’s the nature of the relationship that children have with their parents, rather than mere living arrangements, that most affects their happiness levels.

As well as feeling secure in their homes and families, these children are also being listened to, made to feel valued, cherished and praised, and even told they’re good singers when they can’t carry a tune. So we seem to be succeeding in turning out happy, confident, popular children. But whether this means we’ll have a happy, confident and successful adult population in the next generation is by no means certain.

There’s a fascinating theory emanating from America which speculates that this notion of universal positivity, that everyone is entitled to their dreams and capable of realising them, is at the root of the global financial crisis. The whole sub-prime debacle kicked off because people who hadn’t a hope of paying back huge home-loans were nonetheless seduced by the message that they, too, had a right to the happiness and status of property owners. All they had to do was believe and the universe, in the corporeal shape of sub-prime lenders, would provide. These were not dreams, though, but delusions. So these people got their mortgages and bought their homes, but found their cosmic beneficiaries wouldn’t take their calls when the arrears built up.

It is obviously better that we have happy children rather than miserable ones, but the fact that these positive surveys were conducted in the boom years may suggest that an element of our children’s reported contentment is based on perceived security and material comfort as much as on the calibre of their relationships with family and friends. Remember how we beat ourselves up, in the good times, for lavishing expensive toys and games and trophy holidays on our children in lieu of quality time? Maybe these surveys simply reflect the effects of that guilty bounty.

It’s said you owe your children two things: good teeth and a decent education. That’s not so true any more. You can buy perfect Hollywood teeth over the internet these days, and return to education at any stage of your life, but you don’t get a second chance at a secure and contented upbringing. So the only thing you really owe your children is a happy childhood, but that’s not the same as a deluded one.

One of the hallmarks of the Celtic tiger years was the sight of expense account diners playing “credit card snap” at the end of a pricey meal. Waiters would stand with their credit card terminals while the merry customers battled it out to see who had the quickest draw, the biggest expense account, the most impressive gold or platinum card, the maitre d’s most familiar attention. Bills were snatched from their leather presentation wallets, signed with a flourish and rarely checked unless to see if a sufficiently generous service charge was included.

Times have certainly changed. In a top Dublin restaurant last week, a favourite haunt of business types dining with contacts and clients, I spotted a polite notice at the end of the bill regretting that a maximum of three credit cards would be accepted per table. The waiter assured us that this was standard practice, but it still conjured up the image of corporate diners in an anxious huddle over the bill, Laser cards in hand, trying to work out who ordered the second plate of chips.

brenda.power@sunday-times.ie

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