The neglected children who are missing a hug from their father

DISPLACED IN MULLINGAR:I WAS PASSING a garage that sells jeeps one evening and I stopped to admire a 2008 silver Toyota. After a few seconds, a boy with bleached hair, and wearing a white plastic anorak, emerged from an alleyway beside the garage, writes Michael Harding.

"Are you thinking of buying?" he asked.

I said, "Yes." He smirked and said, "I'll sell you that one." I asked him did he work in the garage? He said, "No, but I could steal it, handy enough." I thought he was serious.

"I'm only messing," he said.

He really wanted a euro, so I gave it to him. And then he faded into the shadows; back down the alleyway where he is passing his teenage years with other young boys in hoods.

He is one of Mullingar's good-looking but shy teenagers who spend hours before the mirror, but have no confidence. They use too much deodorant, and they mimic the swagger of African-Americans in music videos on MTV, as they hang around the back streets, or haunt the doors of the off-licence.

The lanes and alleyways of Ireland are full of such boys, who can't remember a single hug from their father's arms before he walked out the door forever.

But I suppose Ireland was never great at parenting skills; too much cold tyranny followed by complete neglect. In Famine times, fathers from the country would sometimes come into town on a cart and dump their dying children in the alleyways, so that the authorities would be forced to care for them.

In the century that followed, shopkeepers with slate-roofed houses continued to be terrified of young people's vitality, or whatever moved in the dark. Prayer, police and good bankers were the obvious solutions, and domestic fascism was hailed as a virtue.

I was talking to an ex-prisoner recently. He is in his 50s, and his arms are plastered with old tattoos. His father was an amateur barber. A wet day was known as a haircut day; when there was nothing to do, men would congregate in his house and his father would cut hair.

One day his father approached him with a scissors and a porridge bowl. The boy fled down the street, his father cursing at his heels.

Two hours later, his father dropped dead on the floor of a public house: the two events were not connected, but the boy grew up with the conviction that his life of crime began the day he lost his daddy's love.

Some daddies have no love to give; I remember a boy who told me that his father didn't allow his mother to watch television. When his father came home at night he would put his hand to the back of the television set, to see if it was warm. Then he would either rape the mother or beat her up. After the separation, the mother found a lover as lean as a whippet.

The boy withdrew to the fields behind the house and made friends with a donkey. All was well, until one day Mr Whippet arrived with a baseball bat for the poor donkey.

What people in the suburbs feared for years was that poor boys might someday break into the bedroom, and demand money for drugs. They never expected an investment banker to slither into their bank accounts in the middle of the night, mug all the posh sleepers and vanish into thin air with the pension fund; that's causing a lot of stress in the sauna.

All of a sudden there are cars for sale everywhere; in car parks, side streets, and on lay-bys along the Tullamore road.

And people in shops have worried faces. Managers in electrical stores, in restaurants, in small gift shops, all look a bit grim. I know one store where the shelves are half-empty.

Not that the credit crunch means anything to the invisible boys in the alleyways of Mullingar.

The daddy thing and the unlived son-ship is the beat that they rap to, as they mooch about in the alley, displaced in the jeep jungle, unfettered by morality, because no man ever told them they are beautiful.

They stare at me with bony faces, unflinching, like warriors in battle: a clenched fist and a can of beer. They notice people on MTV wearing Obama T-shirts and wonder why. And they have no intention of showing weakness. Not now.

mharding@irish-times.ie