Paul Rouse: Bursting with the energy of a match soon to be played

The screen is in plain view, it’s impossible not to be drawn into it.

The scrolling starts — and then ends almost immediately. He starts to play a video of a man talking to a camera. It’s the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in what must be his daily recorded message for social media.

Zelenskyy looks grave, as he often does these days. The boy watches the video a few times. It is a brutal fact that his journey to school is so heavily influenced by the imperial violence of Vladimir Putin, an old-style dictator garbed in the technological trappings of modernity.

At its core, this war, brought in on a screen to a Dublin bus, is a depressingly familiar one: A little man grown into power, conditioned by a warped understanding of history and driven by his own desire for a place in it, causes the death of hundreds of thousands of people, many of them from his own country.

Not one of Putin’s apologists —wherever they are from — has offered a case for war that is convincing, or even coherent; he is an apostle of death, although his own hypochondria means he himself also lives in constant fear, petrified of his own mortality.

The boy watches Zelenskyy a few times, as if he’s stuck on a loop. There’s been almost three years of this now. Three years. One-fifth of this boy’s life, more or less.

Eventually, he scrolls on to some soccer feed. It’s the Champions league from all across Europe. Goal after goal, save after save, red cards, misses, celebrations, lamentations, joyous crowd scenes, a ball kicked and headed and handled. It’s addictive viewing, a relentless blizzard of action and emotion.

The modern way of cutting together highlights is a long way past what used to be shown on Match of the Day, or The Big Match. It’s not better or worse, necessarily, just different.

Like with Zelenskyy, I don’t consciously decide to watch the boy’s phone from the corner of my eye, but there it sits, its glow and flicker impossible to escape.

The bus passes through the city centre, down O’Connell Street. 

A year ago, no bus had been able to come down here when, for several hours, law and order was abandoned, shops were ransacked and property destroyed. The tangled wreckage of a tram lent elegant testimony to the scale of the destruction.

In the way of these things, explanations of the Dublin riots were reduced to simplistic rehearsals of those who saw it either as the logical outcome of poverty and alienation or dismissed it as mere thuggery.

Neither of these alternative interpretations was convincing; indeed, the absence of nuance and care in examining causes was depressing.

The day before the riots, Conor McGregor, had posted “Ireland, we are at war” on social media, in response after a report said that non-nationals could vote in local elections.

During the riots, McGregor had posted things such as “Make change or make way. Ireland for the victory.” and “You reap what you sow.”

Indeed.

The street looks well now in its Christmas clothes and the riots have retreated in the memory. It is a mistake to imagine that the forces that drove the violence with such ferocity have evaporated, however.

Across into the southside, the world changes again. A boy with a hurl is standing beside two girls with hockey sticks at a bus stop.

They get on, laughing together. Hockey was the first team sport to be organised for girls in Ireland. It has a long and proud tradition in the country, notably in schools which have kept it alive for generation after generation.

The girls who played it 100 years ago had been born into a world where they couldn’t vote. Very few of their peers played any sport. The world sometimes turns for the better.

As for the boy: There was a time when anyone who walked with a hurl through Ranelagh or Rathmines or down Leeson Street could immediately be marked down as someone up from the country who was most likely living in one of the thousands of flats that ran through these inner suburbs.

Not any more.

The flats and bedsits are largely gone; the houses returned to family homes. And hurling is now played by many of the children who live in those homes. Naturally, rugby and soccer also flourish, but Ranelagh Gaels are thriving and there are also many children who head out to Kilmacud Crokes or to other southside GAA clubs.

In the roll of honour of All-Ireland winners, Dublin is credited with six All-Irelands. This is true and not true. Every position on every one of those teams was filled with a countryman who had moved to the city.

Maybe this schoolboy — most likely on his way out to Coláiste Eoin — will be part of a generation that changes that. Really, though, that doesn’t matter. Or at least it doesn’t really matter. The game has spread — that’s the real glory. Two more boys with hurls are at the next stop past Donnybrook. 

They get on and sit two seats in front of me, wedged into each other and a space that now overflows with schoolbags, gear-bags and timber.

They are bursting with the energy of a match soon to be played.

It’s not easy to be a kid now; the screen has changed an awful lot. It offers a portal to many different realities — good and bad — even in the space of a bus journey.

Against that, there is an awful lot that is not at all different. There’s a lot to be said for being able to walk through a school gate with a hurley.

*Paul Rouse is professor of history at UCD.