Lara sat at the keyboard, gazing idly at the title of the piece she was yet to write: My vision for Europe in 2045.

It was a straightforward enough title – what fantastic futuristic progress did she, a sixteen-year-old living in Dublin in 2030, envision would be made by the EU in fifteen years’ time? A straightforward enough question, which had surprised her by how difficult it was to answer.

How much of what she was to write would be what she predicted versus what she wanted? What was more, how could she incorporate all that into an 800-word essay, while simultaneously covering what had happened between now and then? How could she explain that a 100% rosy and lovely future didn’t seem justifiable?

There were a lot of things she hoped would happen, though, come to think about it. She hoped that Poland would legalise gay marriage like the rest of Europe had, and that Russia wouldn’t be so blatantly homophobic (though it had supposedly stopped persecuting LGBTQs, ten years ago, after the UN finally made enough of a fuss.) She hoped abortion legislation would be properly reformed and would actually work in the world’s favour, despite having been rushed and butchered by hasty politicians seeking votes.

It was also interesting to imagine what the gender status might be. Lara knew the number of women in decent political and social positions had increased since she’d been born, but gender equality was still a myth. That was something she really wanted to change. For one thing, she didn’t feel much was being done about gender stereotypes, hissed constantly in her face by mainstream media. Still, it was believed far fewer people associated feminism with oppression. Emma Watson’s winning the Nobel Prize in 2023 had apparently generated a great deal of publicity for that cause. Lara vaguely remembered the event from her childhood – there had been lots of pictures of the actress shaking hands with Hillary Clinton, the then US president.

And if only the church would get its nose out of state affairs in Ireland, once and for all. In her opinion schools shouldn’t be segregated by religion, and worship should be something people chose. Maybe there’d be more attention paid to the Irish language in schools by 2045, something she’d watched dwindle throughout her own school years, to her frustration. She wondered whether Britain would ever cease to be a monarchy. Maybe Scotland would embrace its newfound, two-year-old independence. Then with any luck it might also allow its struggling, first-time government to form, instead of refusing to accept any law they tried to pass, and resolutely paying shops with pounds instead of euros. With a smile, she realised that in 2045 they’d be approaching the 50th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland.

Maybe Belgium would actually accept itself as one country, sharing French and Flemish cultures – a miracle, really. She wished Russia would back off out of Ukraine, a corner of which it had crept into years ago before gradually taking over the entire country. She hoped the Baltic States, shivering nervously in the cold winds blowing their way from Russia, would manage to stay independent. She wondered when Norway would complete the complicated official process of joining the EU, as it had been trying to do for a few years now – ever since it had been given an estimate on when its oil resource would run out.

Lara shuddered at the thought of what would happen when worldwide fossil fuels were completely gone. She supposed the campaign for green energy, started by the USA and the EU and then continued – with initial lethargy and growing urgency – by the member states, would grow and grow, until nobody could go on pretending it was going to make any difference, in the end. It made her gut-wrenchingly angry to think that her potential children might never see a Siberian tiger, even in the zoo. As it was, it seemed tigers would follow the dodo, the Zanzibar leopard and the polar bear – to extinction.

Hopefully Europe would provide for more immigrants, as well as refugees from the conflict in Africa and the Middle East – despite the collapsed attempt at a Refugees Initiative in 2026 (her dad kept complaining about that). There’d probably be an even more established Polish community in Ireland than there already was. She wondered whether they’d have found a cure for cancer, or a new world-changing vaccination – like the one for ebola that had appeared in 2018. She crossed her fingers at the thought of a new vaccination for TB, which had been declared officially immune to all known antibiotics in 2022. She wondered whether anything would ever be done about North Korea.

Slowly, Lara began her essay.