Address To The Youth Of Ireland
Put the phone face-down a minute. An old fire wants a word.This is an address to the youth of Ireland, and it begins with something you are owed and rarely given: an apology. You were handed a two-hundred-year-old silence you never chose — and then sent out into the loudest age in human history carrying it, while the papers wondered what could possibly be wrong with the young people. Nothing is wrong with you. Something was handed to you. They are different things, and the difference is the beginning of your freedom.The address names how the old Irish silence found your generation in new clothes — the meme, the "all good" text, the curated profile, the endless scroll: the old house of going-around, rebuilt in glass and light, with one terrible improvement — it travels with you.And it gives full room to the table you were actually set, and says it straight: the rent and the locked door of the housing market — the landlord back, wearing a lanyard; the boat back in the water, your class scattered to Sydney and Vancouver and the group chat gone half to Australian time; the vanished free rooms where gathering could happen; the locked years and the thresholds that never got crossed; the world glowing in your pocket at one in the morning; and the industries engineered to feed on your attention and your loneliness. You are not soft — "snowflake" is only the old who do you think you are with the serial numbers filed off. You are carrying the old wounds in new dress, plus several no generation ever carried before, and you are still here, still funny, still kind. That is endurance of the first order.But the conditions are real — and the silence is still not the answer to them. Because silence privatises pain that is collective: it takes each of you into a separate room and whispers that the rent, the boat, the dread are your personal failure. They are not. A silent generation endures its conditions. A speaking one changes them.There is a word here for the young men in particular, for whom the tax falls heaviest. And it ends with the commission: you are the first generation in the whole long story whose silence is defended by nothing — no empire, no cloth, no law — only habit. And a habit, unlike a rent, can be broken this evening, for free.Written to be read aloud — in a classroom, at a gathering, at a fire. It may be copied, printed, and shared freely, in full and with its title, anywhere it might do good. If you are not young, give it to someone who is.From the book The Fire Under the Grass, available from this store.
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