A TEENAGER sits next to me on the top deck of a bus in Dublin. He is wearing his school uniform. It’s not long after eight in the morning and the boy does what so many others of all ages are doing now – in public and private – he takes out his cell phone.
He places the phone on his knees, which are folded against the front seat, and puts headphones in his ears. So far the new normal: no teenager now has a conscious memory of a world without smartphones.
The screen is clearly visible, it is impossible not to be drawn into it.
The scrolling starts – and then ends almost immediately. He starts playing a video of a man talking to a camera. It’s the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in what must be his daily recorded social media post.
Zelenskyy looks serious, as he often does these days. The boy watches the video a few times. It’s a cruel fact that his journey to school is so deeply influenced by the imperial violence of Vladimir Putin, an old-fashioned dictator dressed in the technological trappings of modernity.
At its core, this war, shown on a screen on a bus in Dublin, is depressingly familiar: a small man’s rise to power, conditioned by a warped understanding of history and driven by his own desire for a place in it , causes the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, many from his own country.
None of Putin’s apologists – wherever they come from – have made a case for war that is convincing or even coherent; he is an apostle of death, although through his own hypochondria he also lives in constant fear, petrified of his own mortality.
The boy looks at Zelenskyy a few times, as if stuck in a loop. This was almost three years ago now. Three years. A fifth of this boy’s life, more or less.
Eventually he scrolls through to a football feed. It is the Champions League of all Europe. Goal after goal, save after save, red cards, misses, celebrations, lamentations, cheerful crowd scenes, a ball kicked and headed and handled. It’s addictive viewing, a relentless blizzard of action and emotion.
The modern way of putting highlights together is far beyond what was shown in the past Match of the dayor The big match. It’s not necessarily better or worse, just different.
As with Zelenskyy, I choose not to consciously look at the boy’s phone out of the corner of my eye, but there it is, the glow and flicker impossible to escape.
The bus travels through the city centre, onto O’Connell Street.
A year ago, not a single bus could have come here, when law and order was abandoned for hours, shops were looted and property was destroyed. The tangled wreckage of a tram provided elegant testimony to the scale of the destruction.
In this way, explanations of the Dublin riots were reduced to simplistic rehearsals by those who either saw it as the logical consequence of poverty and alienation or dismissed it as a mere act of violence.
None of these alternative interpretations were convincing; the lack of nuance and care in exploring the causes was depressing.
The day before the riots, Conor McGregor had posted on social media “Ireland, we are at war”, in response to a report stating that non-citizens could vote in local elections.
During the riots, McGregor had posted things like “Make change or make way. Ireland for the win.” and “You reap what you sow.”
Indeed.
The street now looks good in Christmas clothes and the riots have receded into the memory. However, it is a mistake to think that the forces that drove the violence with such ferocity have evaporated.
Across the South Side, the world is changing again. At a bus stop, a boy with a slingshot stands next to two girls with hockey sticks.
They continue and laugh together. Hockey was the first team sport organized for girls in Ireland. It has a long and proud tradition in the country, especially in schools that have kept it alive generation after generation.
The girls who played it 100 years ago were born into a world where they couldn’t vote. Very few of their peers played a sport. Sometimes the world turns for the better.
As for the boy, there was a time when anyone who walked through Ranelagh or Rathmines or down Leeson Street with a slingshot could immediately be identified as someone from the country who most likely lived in one of the thousands of flats that ran through it. these inner neighborhoods.
Not anymore.
The flats and bedrooms have largely disappeared; the houses returned to family homes. And hurling is now played by many of the children living in those homes. Of course rugby and football are flourishing too, but Ranelagh Gaels are flourishing and there are also a lot of kids who go to Kilmacud Crokes or other GAA clubs in the south.
In the roll of All-Ireland winners, Dublin is credited with six All-Irelands. This is true and not true. Every position on each of those teams was filled with a fellow countryman who had moved to the city.
Perhaps this schoolboy – most likely on his way to Coláiste Eoin – will be part of a generation that changes all that. But that doesn’t really matter. Or at least it doesn’t really matter. The game has spread – that’s the real glory. At the next stop past Donnybrook there are two more boys with streamers.
They get in and sit two chairs in front of me, pressed together, in a room that is now overflowing with school bags, bags and wood.
They are bursting with energy from a match that will soon be played.
It’s not easy being a kid now; the screen has changed tremendously. It provides a portal to many different realities – good and bad – even on a bus trip.
On the other hand, there is a lot that is not different at all. There’s a lot to be said for being able to walk through the school gates with a hurley.
*Paul Rouse is Professor of History at UCD.