IT'S A DAD'S LIFE: of Bratz and High School Musical, we need this generation to show some backbone, writes Adam Brophy
IT'S THE little differences that make me laugh, the things that catch you unawares, the things you never expected when you packed your bag and departed for the sticks.
When I go for a 40-minute run at rush hour on the roads nearby and am passed only by a tractor and a horse, I'm not that surprised.
But I get a massive kick out of witnessing the elder and her schoolmates being made to do three laps of the basketball courts before marching into class. "Do you do that every morning?" I ask. "Yeah, except when it's lashing. I hate it. I hope it rains every day," says she.
Brilliant. This is the girl who instructs me to open her car door chauffeur style when she's slightly fatigued, who takes off her coat at the first hint of sun and drops it on the ground knowing I will be on hand to pick it up. Who refuses to unbutton her shirt at night because "it's sooo unfair there are sooo many buttons and you have to do them all again in the morning".
Run them ragged I say. Fill their backpacks with rocks and keep them at it all day. Broadcast lessons via tannoy as they trudge ever on. Send them home in ribbons and ready for war.
My generation, never having had to concern ourselves with fighting for anything, is soft and blasé. We need the next to shore up the defences and show a bit of backbone.
We fret about recession and credit and two holidays a year, when a psychotic despot could at any moment eye up our green land and say, "I'll have a bit of that."
In he comes, Viking style (it's happened before), and all we can manage is to limpwristedly attempt to repel the hordes with mortgage statements for second properties and run them over with our nearly new Beamers. When Abramovich tires of Chelsea he could have Ireland with a distracted flex of his left bicep.
Gaelscoil Cloch na gCoillte is leading the way, forging Irish marines as comfortable with Irish language and lore as they will be at snapping the Sassanach's, sorry I meant invader's, neck.
Since starting there the elder has increased her skipping rate to about 240 loops per minute and she takes the dog for extreme mountain runs rather than walks. She returns from these runs with the carcasses of rabbits draped over her shoulders, skinned, gutted and ready for the pot. She sits by the fire at night, mending her clothes and crooning soft songs in a language I barely recognise. She speaks of revolution, the need for a return to the source, to be at one with the land and the sea, and to enthusiastically promote and protect what is ours.
She does all this while gazing in rapture at the framed picture of Michael Collins she hung above the mantelpiece one night as the rest of us slept. She's different from the girl we once knew.
Oh, if only it were true. If only we weren't all breeding homogenised Bratz with High School Musical ideals who plug into Nintendo Wii and fully believe that swinging a white stick in the general direction of a TV screen is a replacement for playing tennis.
We have kids sitting in the same room as each other communicating via Bebo without looking up from their internet-ready mobile handsets which mummy bought them on their seventh birthday in case "heaven forbid, something happened at school and Chloe/Jack just had to call".
These same kids have 97 different rhymes to call each other loser, all delivered in midtown Manhattan accents, and know what Zac Efron likes in a girl.
These kids frighten me, especially in a pack, usually with one staring you down like some ghetto gangster and you, the parent, be da po-leece.
I always thought the teen years would freak me, but now realise I can relate to all that angst and misery never having quite shaken it off in adulthood. I don't take it to heart when they say nobody understands them man, because, quite simply, I don't.
It's these precocious pre-teens with their Hollywood attitudes and demands for an appropriately glittery lifestyle that depress me more. One minute they fall over and cry because they've scraped their knee, the next they're up shaking booty like a demented pole dancer to the latest underground release outta Compton. You don't know where to look, and you've just kissed their knee better.
Run them ragged I say. Rain or shine. Sing Amhrán na bhFiann at the start and end of each school day. And listen to crackly recordings of Dev's speeches throughout.