A study examined the socioeconomic status of Irish youth, the vocational counseling services available to them, and the specific vocational counseling needs of disadvantaged youth in the rural Irish communities of North Mayo and North-West Connemara. It was discovered that the average rural disadvantaged Irish youth is an unemployed single male dropout who lives with his parents, receives social welfare, and has received little/no vocational counseling in or outside of school. Appropriate vocational training with a high quality guidance component was deemed one way of improving rural Irish youths' chances of finding employment and thereby improving their social/economic situation. Other strategies recommended to improve the situation of rural disadvantaged Irish youth were as follows: develop interventions to keep them in school longer, use the local media to provide informal guidance to their parents, encourage a policy of positive discrimination in employers' recruitment practices, and use European Community (EC) programs to establish a bridgehead for Irish youth into training and employment opportunities in other EC member states. (Contains 33 references.) (MN)