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