Despite their cockiness, I feel sorry for today's teens

Sunday Tribune, 30 May

The nun on the Honda 50 was displaying a lot more leg than good taste required.
"Jesus, Joyce, pull your skirt down. Your knickers are showing."
Joyce's bloomers were bright pink and disturbingly tight.
"Seriously, you'll get us arrested for indecency," whined the vicar with the 'Bosco's a B****x' tee-shirt riding alongside. Joyce responded by hiking the skirt up to waist-height.
"Wheeeeeeeeeeee!" she squealed, spreading her legs and letting the wind whistle up her habit as the Honda 50 spluttered along Hudson Road.
Mark Joyce cut a memorable figure. You don't often see six-foot-two, rugby-playing nuns going "wheeee" on a Honda 50. I've often wondered if Joycey developed a 'taste' for it. If you're reading this… don't bother to let me know.
It was May 1984 and 'rag day' at Presentation College, Glasthule. School was finally over and we were blowing off the last puff of childish steam before sitting the Leaving.
Forty of us cycled in a fancy dress convoy (I was a hippy), to Dalkey for an egg battle with the girls from Loreto. They were a scary bunch. Rumour had it that two had already been expelled for "accidentally" gluing a real-life nun to a toilet. They won, ambushing us in a hail of porridge and raw eggs. I remember trying to lasso one of them from my bike as an egg exploded on my mullet.
I was lucky. The Loreto girls gave another boy a porridge wedgie – the worst kind. I'll never forget his shrieks as six of them lifted him up by his underpants and porridge squelched out over his waistband.
There was no sign of eggs or ripped jocks as I walked past the school the other day. The current girls from Loreto, with their photofit hair-dos and orange tans, are far too civilised for egg warfare. Like thousands of other Leaving Cert students, they heard the school gates clang shut behind them last week. They are now facing into No Man's Land – the area between childhood and adulthood, Leaving Cert and results. Just as we did in 1984.
Thinking back last week, I remembered all the pressure not to fail. Would I have to repeat? Would I be left behind as my friends moved on? Would I be back in school as they studied alongside girls and drank subsidised beer in student bars?
Fourteen years of school was compressed into a few weeks, followed by two months of trying not to think about results. July and August were spent mostly hanging around, broke, literally sharing a cigarette and squeezing the last life out of friendships that wouldn't survive into adulthood.
It's easy to dislike this generation when you view them through 40-year-old eyes. We had little and they have too much. They're narcissistic. They have Facebook to broadcast their every humdrum thought. Would the teens of 1984 have embraced such self-promoting technology? Actually, yes, we would have. We didn't have Facebook – we had CB radio. Remember that? Facebook is this generation's CB radio. We had the same need to connect with the world.
Take away the money and today's teens are essentially the same as we were. They even have some new problems, such as cyber bullying. We could just shut the front door. Or conflicting signals about sex and love thanks to the broadband porn revolution. Then there's the wider availability of drugs to mess up their heads.
When the 1980s' teens look at today's crop, all they see is pushiness and money. We tend to forget it wasn't always fun being a hormonal teenager. I suspect we're a little jealous of today's kids. Now they're about to endure real hardship, the fortysomethings are enjoying a little schadenfreude at their expense.
On The Late Late Show recently, Bill Cullen said young people should stop complaining and get on with life. A businesswoman evoked the fighting spirit of the '80s. The theme was "if it was good enough for me…"
This trite guff is wearing thin. The reality is this: during the boom, Ireland spawned a generation of spoiled, middle- class, latch-key kids. Life lessons were replaced by over-indulgence. They would have everything we didn't have. It's no wonder so many teens appear so shallow to non-parents like me. They were bound to grow up that way.
The main difference between 1984's teens and today's is that we had no great expectations. We didn't know anything other than being broke. It gave us a mental toughness which teens now lack. The absence of self-entitlement protected us as we crossed No Man's Land.
Today's Leaving Cert students are not prepared for what lies ahead. Despite their cockiness, I feel sorry for them. We had it bad, but they're in for an even more frightening jolt of reality. They were told they were guaranteed a job after college. Now they will have to learn just to survive.
Some people reading this will be relishing the prospect of spoiled teenagers experiencing what we did. Just remember this: those teenagers are the people who will lead the country in our old age. Not so funny now, is it?
If I had a choice between leaving school in 1984 or 2010, the decade of nuns on Hondas would win hands down.
I wouldn't be a teenager right now for anything.

dkenny@tribune

Let's protest to get things done, but one issue at a time

Sunday Tribune, 23 May

May 1985 and a skinny 18-year-old walks up the back stairs of the Irish Press. He has a magnificent mullet and is wearing drainpipe, sky-blue trousers and gleaming white shoes. He (okay, me) looks like a toilet brush with legs.
"You'll wreck those shoes with all the ink here," an equally-mulleted runner told me as I settled in to my first night as a copyboy. He eyed them covetously.
He was right. Within an hour of running along the metal gangway with copy for the caseroom, they were blacker than a printer's fingernail. I sold them to him for a tenner. He used to carry around a tube of white polish to keep them gleaming.
It's a trivial detail to mention, but to me, 25 years on this week, this shows how indelibly the Irish Press inked itself onto my synapses. It would become my fulcrum for the next decade.
I remember the chemical tang of the dark rooms and the clutter of the newsroom. The bundles of pencil-subbed copy and the aroma of Pritt Stick. I still hear the tinnitus-like ringing of phones, the clatter of Linotype printing machines and Farah-slacked old lads singing "My, my, MYYYYYYYYYY... DELILAH!"
I recall the years slipping by in Mulligan's and the verbal sparring which sometimes turned physical. A drunk colleague once told me: "Journalists shouldn't fight with each other."
I was scathing. "Why? Because we're some kind of specially-anointed brotherhood?"
"No," he replied. "Because we're crap at it."
I see the old Linotypes being replaced by Harris computers and Burgh Quay hushed into a sleek, silent age. Two months after starting in my white shoes, there was a strike and printers who had worked there for decades were laid off. That was 25 years ago this week.
Ten years later, and also this week, I was the one being made redundant.
The dispute is largely forgotten now. A stand-off between the NUJ and management led to 40 journalists sitting-in at Burgh Quay. I was one of them.
Rebelling against The Man was one of the most enjoyable things I've ever done. I loved the attention. Sky News filmed us waving from the windows. Celebrities, even the Irish soccer team, showed up to show support. The country was behind us.
We worked on our own paper, the XPress. It was our 'War News'. After four sleepless nights we left to be greeted by 1,000 cheering journalists who had marched on the Dáil. The rest of that summer was a haze of marching and producing the XPress. I watched old, jaded hacks being rejuvenated by 'the struggle'. Then summer burned itself out and hope faded. People fell away. I worked on the last XPress in September. After 10 years of learning to edit, write and drink, I fell away too. The Irish Press was dead.
Depressing reality and the sudden gut-punch of mass redundancy hit home. Some would never work again. Some would drink themselves to death.
Sitting here now, 15 years later, I think I knew all along we'd never win. My protest was about pride. I actually hated the Irish Press. It had devoured my 20s.
The hundreds of redundancies to come at Pfizer reminded me of what it's like to face losing your job. I know what they're going through – I've been made redundant three times. No amount of marching will help. There are times when you can't win and must aim instead at squeezing the best out of a bad situation. You target specifics like beefing-up pay-offs. You aim for the winnable, realistic stuff.
You don't behave like Richard Boyd Barrett. Last Tuesday, his Right To Work campaign protested at Leinster House for the second time in a fortnight. Previously, some of the group tried to 'storm' the Dáil and gardaí drew their batons. Éirígí, who are agitating for a socialist republic, were involved.
I have voted for Boyd Barrett in the past for his work in Dun Laoghaire. Last week, I regretted it for the first time.
His campaign has undermined all future protests by its sheer bloody pointlessness. What does 'Right To Work' mean anyway? We all know we have that right. How is this campaign going to create jobs? This was purely about pushing Boyd Barrett's and Éirégí's unrealistic socialist agenda. Other marches by people with specific grievances will now be marked by heightened security. Elements among the radical socialists want this. They want batons to swing in a Grecian frenzy.
This was self-indulgent "down with capitalism" stuff. Single issue protests are the only way to achieve change – not fighting an 'ism'. Boyd Barrett knows this. He fought a single-issue battle to save Dun Laoghaire's baths and won.
The medical card and head shops campaigns worked because they had single, achievable targets. The media campaigns against TDs' expenses worked for the same reason.
Ireland will never be a socialist republic. Social justice can only be achieved bit by bit. Public protest is integral to this – but not the pie-in-the-sky crap we've seen from Boyd Barrett's crew.
The Right To Work march was as effective as my marching to save the Irish Press. Boyd Barrett needs to stop dreaming of his utopia and start trying to achieve something.
What do we want? For you to stop wasting our time with pointless marches. When do we want it? Now.

dkenny@tribune.ie

Sometimes the growing pains just never go away

Sunday Tribune 16 May

A story in the news last week reminded me of an old friend. Before I get to that story, I'd like to tell you about him. Forgive me for being nostalgic, the pay-off is important.
The first time I saw Brian we were both 13. I wasn't impressed by him. He looked like a shaper as he stalked the schoolyard in his navy Eskimo anorak, hands in pockets, clicking the studs on the heels of his George Webbs.
I think our friendship started with a fight. If it did, it would have been all 'hold-me-back' posturing followed by a flurry of missed kicks at each other's crotch, ending in a headlock. Brian, as it turned out, was no shaper. Like me, he fought like a girl. He was also gregarious, insecure and infectiously funny.
We became friends and sat beside each other, trying to cause as much disruption as possible. We slagged everything, as all 14-year-olds do to deflect attention away from themselves. Clothes, hairstyles, even bikes were fair game.
Brian had a 20-gear Asahi racer, while I had a crock of crap masquerading as a Chopper. He never let me forget it was crap – especially as it didn't have a crossbar.
"It's a girl's bike."
"It's not. It's just… streamlined. It's a streamlined Chopper."
"But it folds in half."
"It's a Chopper."
"It's a girl's bike and you're a girl." The bike was eventually 'stolen'.
Our afternoons were spent listening to records or cycling around looking at girls. At night we'd slip through back gardens, avoiding dogs, to steal apples which we never ate.
Brian and I learned how to smoke together. We could only afford foul tipped cigars. I accidentally stubbed one out on my arm while we swung from a tree, making monkey noises to annoy the lawn bowlers at Moran Park.
We would ride around with cigars between our teeth, thinking we looked like Clint Eastwood: two short-arses playing at being adults from the safety of childhood.
Brian and I went to our first disco together. We herky-jerk danced like mad to Madness to impress the girls. The more we ran on the spot, the more they liked it – so local stud, Brian Mac, told us. What he didn't tell us was that he had spread the word among the girls that we were "special needs boys" from a care home.
"We're 'in' there," I said, as one waved sympathetically at us. We ran faster on the spot to impress her even more.
Brian was the reason we fell foul of our neighbour, Sinéad O'Connor. Yes, that Sinéad. When we heard she had split up with a classmate, we stood outside her house calling up at her window. We believed this would encourage her to go out with one of us. Instead, it terrified her. Her sister chased us down the road. (Sinéad, if you're reading this…).
The day Brian moved down the country was the bleakest of my life up until then. I couldn't tell him I was going to miss him. You didn't say that to your mates.

Years passed and we lost touch. We picked up our friendship again when he eventually moved back. Then we both got night jobs and lost touch again. We orbited the same crowds, but never seemed to meet up.
In November 1992, Brian walked into his local and settled a few small debts. He was in good form. He was 25.
Later that night, Brian turned the exhaust pipe in on his car. He killed himself. No one had seen it coming.
I try not to think of his final moments. How alone he must have felt. How his family felt when they heard the news. How whoever found him felt. How I felt.
The 14-year-old who shared my growing pains was gone. The reason why is not important now. I have other questions. What would his children have been like? Would he have enjoyed my wedding? Would we still be friends, tilting at the bar in Finnegan's?
Brian – that's not his real name – came back to me last Wednesday when I read that the Marks & Spencer model Noémie Lenoir had tried to kill herself. I was surprised at how hard that story struck me. Lenoir is young, beautiful: people like her don't kill themselves. People like Brian don't kill themselves.
Newspapers generally don't carry suicide stories because of the 'Werther effect', where reporting might encourage copycats. Sadly, Lenoir's attempt will have sown the seed in some minds.
The suicide rate here has risen by 35% since last year (CSO) as more people succumb to depression. (www.samaritans.org)
Two years before Brian's death, I suffered a prolonged period of desperate sadness. I was luckier than him: I learned from it. I think of what I could have said to him had I known what he was going through.
I could have told him we all crash emotionally, but we don't have to burn. It's possible to walk away from the wreckage. I would have told him that he didn't really want to leave, he just wanted the feelings to stop. I would have told him that the darkness passes.
I would have told him that he will always be my friend.
I would have told him that he was never really alone.

dkenny@tribune.ie

Deluded Tiger cubs still have their heads in the sand

Sunday Tribune, 9 May

"You did well," my father said as he herded the coins off the table into the palm of his hand. "I'll make it up to a pound and we'll turn these into paper."
Dressed in my new black blazer, tie and slacks, I felt like a man who had come into some huge inheritance. I'd buy a car, I thought. Or, at least, all the sweets in Robertson's.
Later, at my Communion lunch in the Killiney Court Hotel, I heard the note crinkle in my pocket as I cut into my first steak dinner. I have a picture of the occasion. I'm all self-conscious elbows and skewed spectacles trying to look grown-up.
The picture is a reminder that my Communion Day was a watershed, spiritually and financially. It was a religious awakening, and also the day I came to covet money for the first time.
It's still the same for Irish children. We do mixed values from an early age in Ireland. We just do it on a bigger scale these days.
Across the road, 25 years later, two friends who made their Communion on the same day changed my view of money again. The well-known chef and the Entrepreneur drove to Killiney beach after a typically indulgent Celtic Tiger meal. They brought a bottle of vintage Victorian-era port.
"We drank it as the sun came up," Entrepreneur told me the following day, "then we tossed the bottle in the water." He expected me to be impressed. I felt sorry for him instead. The moment when two men bush-drank expensive port was when the Tiger reached its tacky apotheosis for me.
I realised then that Entrepreneur had the same concept of money as I did on my Communion Day, when I mentally plundered a sweetshop. I realised he, and to a lesser extent me, were like children who had lost the run of themselves.
Last week, Nama chief Frank Daly announced the final round-up of those who lost the run of themselves and won't accept the Tiger is dead. Those who cling to their "extravagant mindsets" are in for a shock. Trophy homes are at risk. This was welcomed as the proof that the Tiger is finally dead.
It isn't. Despite the hardships, it's still alive – in the equally extravagant mindsets of the other, non-developer, sections of society. There were three outstanding examples of this last week.
On Sunday, the Sunday Independent editor published a photograph of himself lolling on a knoll with a doll. He lay in the grass at Trinity with model Rosanna Davison and listened to her explain "her side" of her "controversial moonlight flit" to Marrakech with developer Johnny Ronan. If you're not familiar with that story, don't worry – it's really not worth reading about.
Rosanna was "shocked by the level of interest in this story". She wasn't the only one. I'm loath to have a pop at another paper, but a full broadsheet page, written by an editor, on the witterings of a former Miss World?
The Rosanna story didn't do anything for the news agenda of the day, but it did help perpetuate the myth that the Tiger days of endless alcopop launches and whirlwind holidays were still roaring along.
Do readers really buy into this? Or do they just read these stories to sneer at the likes of Rosanna? I don't know. Either way, they sell newspapers.
The second example of the Tiger's premature obituary was the funeral of Eamon Dunne. The so-called 'Don' was responsible for 17 murders. He was given a full-on gangster funeral, surrounded by tough-looking men with shaved heads. Tony Soprano would have been envious.
Gangster pomp like Dunne's funeral didn't exist before the Celtic Tiger. Before people like Dunne became rich selling cocaine to Ireland's bright young social set.
The Tiger's darkest side appears to live on.
The third example is the tackiest of them all. Last Monday, Kilkenny City hosted Ireland's first Communion Expo. It was modelled on a wedding fair. There was "complementary curling", "colour confidence consultations" and "goody bags" with "pampering treats". Up-style hairdos ranged "from €30 to €45". One woman planned to spend €1,500 on her daughter's "big day", including a hotel lunch for 30 people.
This Communion/Wedding construction is one of the most obnoxious by-products of the Boom. It's all about one-upmanship. It's vulgar and wasteful. It uses Ronseal-coloured children as accessories. It sets them up for bitter disappointments later in their young lives. 'This week you're a princess bride, next week you're Cinderella as daddy goes on the dole'.
This Communion fair shows that it's not just developers who are in denial about the boom years being over. They're not the only ones that believe this is just a blip and we'll soon be restocking our cellars. 'Ordinary' people are too.
The Celtic Tiger will never be dead while newspapers continue to sell society girls as role models and idiots prop up drug gangs by buying cocaine.
It will dwell in the Irish psyche until parents stop passing the message on to their children that 'bling is still in'.
If that doesn't stop, the generation making their Communion this month haven't a prayer of ever realising that the Tiger is never, ever coming back.

dkenny@tribune.ie

Crispgate ads should be taken with a pinch of salt

Sunday Tribune, 2 May 2010

The young woman appeared to be playing rugby in her underpants. Her cleavage was spectacular. It looked like Peter Stringer and his bald twin were hiding down the front of her shirt. 'Are you staring at my crisps' read the legend. Of course I wasn't.
I was staring at her eyes. She had lovely eyes…
Hunky Dorys' latest billboard campaign had Ireland's tub-thumpers spluttering in indignation last week. Largo Foods has used scantily-clad female rugby players, like the one mentioned above, to promote its product. One poster says 'Tackle these' as a pneumatic woman legs it down the pitch. It could have been worse: it could have read 'I'm a hooker, maul me'.
Not since those paintings of Brian Cowen in his jocks appeared in the National Gallery has there been such a commotion over a picture.
Catholic group Iona decried it as "grossly offensive and demeaning to women". The advertising standards people received a number of complaints.
That bastion of Irish metrosexuality, the IRFU, was so incensed that it instructed its legal people to examine the claim that Hunky Dorys are 'proud sponsors of Irish rugby'. The ads were in "bad taste", it clucked.
Feminist TV presenter Anna Nolan was one of the few commentators who didn't believe the ads were sexist. She loved the campaign and was dismissive of those who were insulted by it.
So who's right: Nolan or the IRFU? Are the ads offensive? Every woman I asked last week gave the same response: WHO THE HELL CARES? There are more pressing matters to worry about. Like paying mortgages, etc.
For the record, I detest sexism. That cuts both ways, though. If these ads are off­ensive, then I should be offended by ads that use sexual stereotypes of men.
Am I offended by the Galaxy chocolate ad which features an oily gigolo dressed in a skimpy towel?
Or the Diet Coke ads. That window cleaner should have sued those ogling secretaries for sexual harassment. Shouldn't he?
Or the razor ads that promise to make me a babe magnet? I've been shaving for 25 years and still nothing's happened. Mind you, shaving with Gillette seems to have worked for Tiger Woods.
Or what about all the ads that show men as lazy and useless about the house? Or all the times I've heard the line "all men are bastards".
Am I offended by any of the above? Of course not. Why? Because I just don't care enough. Sexual stereotypes will always be used to sell products. That's life.
There are plenty of other ads that are more demeaning of women than the Hunky Dory ones. There's the Boots ads, for example. Why is it that when a group of women appear on TV they must be accompanied by 'Here Come The Girls'? The Boots ads portray women as stupid, vacuous and obsessed with make-up.
The ads for Gillette Venus razors are offensive too. 'I'm your Venus, I'm your fire ...' etc. None of the women I know are vain 'goddess' muppets like the ones portrayed in those ads. Thank God.
And don't get me started about the Bodyform ads with all those glowing models smiling through their periods…
What was really annoying and offensive about this non-debate about crisp ads was that there were other, serious women-related issues to get outraged about.
Last week, the governor of Mountjoy's Dóchas unit, Kathleen McMahon, resigned in protest over the state of the prison system. The plight of Ireland's women prisoners was overshadowed by the Hunky Dory story as the week wore on. That was truly offensive.
On Tuesday, we read that Mary Harney is still making a mess of rolling out the cervical cancer vaccine. After a year of dithering and spinning, Harney says the second jab will be administered while the nation's schoolgirls are on holidays. Many will miss out as a result. Harney's attitude to this issue is far more offensive than the sight of a model in revealing sports gear.
Some readers will criticise me for not taking a zero-tolerance line on this crisp ad. The problem is that knee-jerk responses to equality issues can sometimes do more damage than good.
Overuse of the sexist card lessens its impact. Mary Coughlan learned that when it backfired on her last February. She incorrectly accused Charlie Flanagan of being sexist when he criticised her abilities. She came across as a bully.
The disproportionate response to Crispgate will reinforce the false notion, in some quarters, that all feminists are humourless, prudish killjoys. Through their over-reaction, the offended parties have promoted the very thing they despise. The Hunky Dory ads got blanket coverage. The papers got to write prissy editorials and use the 'offensive' pictures over and over again. They should be more selective when sounding the alarm bells in future. The intention of these tacky ads is not nasty – it's to provoke a response. It worked.
If Anna Nolan says the campaign isn't offensive, then that's good enough for me. Is anyone prepared to call her a sexist?
The best thing to do with ads like these is to take them with a pinch of salt. And possibly some vinegar too.

dkenny@tribune.ie

May 2, 2010