Young single women get a rough time of it from the media, what with reports on their binge-drinking and their plummeting prospects of finding a man once they are past the age of 22.

However young single women are also labelled career girls simply on the basis that they pay their own bills. So what they lose on the misogynistic roundabouts they gain on the patronising swings.

Perhaps it is this relentless wave of negative publicity that has driven females under 35 to acquire the key to their own front doors. They may have gathered that if the future for them really is as bleak as the Daily Mailmakes it out to be, they'd be better off owning the roof over their heads. Or they may simply be very smart.

I find the idea of anyone owning property at the age of 26 peculiar, but I also know single people in their 30s who bitterly regret not hopping on the property ladder when they were first out of school.

Far from wasting their days wondering if they have left it too late to find a spouse, they are wasting their days wondering if they've left it too late to get a mortgage. They were frittering their lives away enjoying themselves, travelling, working and being young. What a set of eejits, eh?

Soon children are going to receive houses, or perhaps site plans, as gifts on the occasion of their First Communion. They could get an apartment when they made their Confirmation . . . in fact I can see this working out quite well.

As it is, the clever young women who have bought houses can look forward to decades and decades of property ownership. It is a nice feeling, to own your own house, and I would not deny it to anyone. The more financially independent a woman is, the better. So I have no advice to offer them . . . other than one should never spend money on curtains . . . and it doesn't look like they need any.

But if we could leave commercial considerations aside . . . just for a nanosecond, I promise . . . we might begin to wonder if it is a good thing that we have a younger generation of women now who have already learned to brace themselves against every possible disaster.

And if they have failed to worry about something then there's always a commercial organisation which is ready to ruin your day by reminding you that the worst is definitely going to happen, if you don't buy from them now. Truly, a consumer society runs on fear.

First of all, we had Eircom terrorising old people about their houses being burgled, at a time when the national burglary rate has never been lower.

Now we have Friends First playing a lot of sad music on their radio advertisement and talking in sinister terms about income protection. People give out about the opening of Stringfellows . . . and quite rightly . . . but when are the security peddlers going to be brought to task for polluting our lives with their horror stories, is what I want to know.

So many bills, and all with your name on them, says the Friends First advertisement.

Which is good really, because otherwise you would be getting someone else's mail.

The sad music drones on and on.

And then of course your house could be robbed.

You could live to 80 (wouldn't that be dreadful? ) and have no money. Better buy a pension.

You could have a baby (wouldn't that be dreadful? ) and have no private health insurance.

Better buy some health insurance. That way if (when) you get MRSA in one of our hospitals, you'll have the comfort of knowing that you contracted it on a private ward.

It is a truism that the rich are always worried.

But who would have thought that we'd be this worried, all the time, or that the youth of the country would start worrying so young ?

There is no doubt that these new homeowners have done the sensible thing. But, strangely enough, that's what worries me.