YSI's Youth Panel at the Listening to Children and Young People - Challenges in Challenging Settings Conference held by EU and organised by Department of Children, Disability and Equality. 

Irish Young People sit down with EU ministers at first-ever conference on listening to Youth Voice

Three young people from the Young Social Innovators’ (YSI) Youth Panel spent two days in Dublin last week telling government ministers and European policymakers what it actually takes to be heard.

The gathering, Listening to Children and Young People - Challenges in Challenging Settings, was the first High-Level Conference of its kind, dedicated entirely to the question of how children and young people can take part in decisions that shape their lives. Organised by the Department of Children, Disability and Equality, it was also a major event of Ireland's Presidency of the Council of the European Union, and it brought more than 250 delegates to Dublin on 30 and 31 July - ministers, policymakers, researchers, children's rights experts, and, at the centre of it, young people themselves.

For the Youth Panel members who travelled from across Ireland, the appeal was straightforward. "The main reason I'm here today is to understand the position of youth voices in policymaking," said one panel member. Another had his sights on a different part of the programme: "I'm most excited to meet the ministers from different countries and the cultural event also sounds really interesting to take part in."

That cultural event turned out to be one of the more memorable parts of the trip. On the first evening, the Irish delegation taught visiting young people from across Europe to play the tin whistle and the bodhrán- an exchange that did more to break the ice than any agenda item. By the second day, panel members said they weren't sitting with strangers anymore. They were comparing notes with young people who understood, in a way most adults in the room did not, what it feels like to have an opinion and nowhere obvious to put it.

The youth delegates were invited to participate in a youth consultation and explore what it means to create a safe digital environment. When presenting their policy recommendations on digital safety and awareness, they reiterated the responsibility of adults as duty bearers to uphold the rights granted to young people described in Article 12 of the UNCRC, that young people are experts in the digital world, and that policymakers need to meaningfully partner with young people, involving them in the decision-making process from the beginning. The majority of young people at the conference were against a social media ban for under 16-year-olds, since it would be easily circumvented, drive use underground, not address the root problem of addictive algorithms, and possibly isolate (marginalised) young people who benefit from supporting networks and friendships online. They recommended instead to focus on parents and guardians to foster good relationships with their children, balancing privacy and safety while allowing them to explore the digital world, create free third spaces for young people that promote healthy and safe socialisation, provide free in-person mental health supports for young people to redirect them from seeking help from AI-Chatbots, and hold companies accountable through harsher restrictions on addictive algorithms, targeted content, and advertisements.


For the Youth Panel, the value lay in the accumulation of small, deliberate choices. Enough time to go deep on a topic rather than skim it, facilitation that treated teenagers as capable of nuance, and a repeated insistence from official bodies that participation has to be built into structures, not bolted on afterwards.

YSI's Youth Panel Members - Valentino Valente, Angela Babikanga, and Rohan Cooney.

Young Social Innovators(YSI) has spent more than 25 years working on exactly that principle, helping young people turn what they notice in their own communities into organised action, and turn that action into something with lasting influence. The Youth Panel exists to keep that work honest: a standing group that connects young people directly with YSI staff and its board, so that decisions about what YSI does are shaped by the people YSI is meant to serve.

It was a highly rewarding experience for the Panellists to be invited to Dublin Castle for this event. Over the past year, they have been working hard as a group within YSI, from collaborating on the Echoboard to working on their own project on rural neglect. For them to step outside of their bubble and discover that other young people from their own counties in Ireland, all the way to other countries like Malta, Lithuania, and Portugal, were doing similar work was surprising and motivating

Ireland's involvement in the conference reflects the European Union's Engage, Connect, Empower youth strategy, which sets out participation as something governments are expected to build into policymaking rather than treat as a courtesy. Ireland has positioned itself as a lead voice on child and youth participation in Europe, and officials from the Department of Children, Disability and Equality said the conference was designed as much to show what participation looks like in practice as to talk about it in theory. Rita Grigalienė, Lithuania's Vice-Minister at the Ministry of Social Security and Labour, told delegates that Lithuania intends to follow Ireland's lead when it takes over the Council Presidency in January 2027.

For the Youth Panel members themselves, the two days added up to something more specific than a line on a CV. They left Dublin having gained insights into the policy-making process, having played a tin whistle badly and then a little less badly, and having met peers from other countries who face the same wall of adult scepticism they sometimes do at home. Whether any of that changes policy is not yet clear. What is clear is that, for once, the room was built to let them try.