With costs often running to €5,000 and more, the 21st birthday party has become an extravagant affair, sometimes rivalling the modern wedding in scale. Ruadhán Mac Cormaic traces the evolution of the Irish party
'Silence. A star-filled sky. Wrought iron gates mysteriously open before you. A Victorian gas-lit carriage awaits. The clippity-clop of horses' hooves in the darkness. Clad in russet-coloured Virginia creeper, the castle emerges from the darkness as you round the first bend. Uplit discreetly, it exudes an air of quiet mystery and fairytale elegance. The second gate opens, taking you into full view of the castle. A lone piper, spotlit in the turret, plays a welcome fanfare. The anticipation mounts . . . An extraordinary event, exclusively yours."
Everyone has a favourite. The story you tell when conversations turn wearily to the way we were and the way we are, to downsides and upsides and flipsides and all the sparkling debris that the 1990s left in their wake. Pocket aphorisms on the guises of change; customs lost, habits gained.
The quotation above supplies the sort of bracing jolt that has most "new-Ireland" backsliders cowering to the hills. It's taken from the promotional material for a popular Dublin venue for private parties; among them, 21st birthdays.
How have we got here? How has the 21st transmogrified in a blink from scraggly Italia '90 T-shirts and warm Dutch Gold in a Rathmines basement flat to horse-drawn carriages, welcome fanfares and quiet mystery? Quiet mystery? A lone piper? Clippity-clop? And who is this Virginia Creeper?
It gets better, or worse, depending on your sensibilities. Tara Fay, an event organiser with Xena Productions, which coordinates weddings and large parties throughout the Republic - including 21st celebrations - claims people are largely unaware of the elaborate scale and cost of an increasing trend.
"We do a few of them each year, but they're becoming hugely popular. They're very, very big. And there's big money involved. You're talking about nearly as much as a wedding. People will pay anything from €5,000 upwards. That's got to be the very minimum. And they can pay up to €100,000."
Oh dear. The Ryan Line is open . . .
"It's true," says Fay. "I don't think people actually realise the amount of money people spend on parties in this country. Think about it. Just work out the maths. People can hire a big marquee or a hotel and invite 100 or 200 people. They can have a sit-down dinner and it's going to cost anything from €50 per person, with drinks on top of that. Are they going to have a band? A DJ? Are they going to have a free bar all night? And I'll tell you, 21-year-olds can drink. Just add everything up and multiply it by the number of people."
At the very expensive end of the market, the exclusive Number 10 venue, based in a grand Georgian mansion on Dublin's Ormond Quay, holds a small number of 21st parties a year. "Clients" can tailor the occasion (and the bill) to the finest detail, choosing between a drinks reception and a "dining experience".
"We certainly have done some very spectacular ones all right," says Number 10's Adrienne Clarke, "where they arrived by vintage cars with black tails; 40 glamorous 21-year-olds. They had dinner and music afterwards and the 12 adults - i.e. parents etc - sat upstairs in the library."
For a party of 40 guests, the minimum cost would come to €3,600. "If they go for foie gras, then it will come to €110 per head. You could easily get people paying over €10,000. If they decided they wanted a certain champagne, then you can spend anything. The world's your oyster. Dom Perignon? I've seen it. I'm not shocked by anything."
If there is a trend toward more elaborate and formalised 21st birthday parties, it sits easily with a more general cultural sprint toward extravagance in marking traditional rites-of-passage. First Communion, Confirmation, school pre-debs, the debs itself, 18th and 21st birthdays, weddings and even funerals: none spared, each ushered into this vortex of disposable income and transposable custom.
In early summer, I noticed a brochure offering parents tips on organising "themed" First Communion parties. "Face painting, caricatures and art are crowd pleasers," it read. "A disc jockey can certainly keep everyone entertained. For something different, you might consider a themed event. Theme parties have become a popular trend. Why not incorporate this idea into a Communion party? For example: a casual outdoor affair could have a carnival theme, complete with rides, games, clowns, jugglers. This is sure to please guests of all ages. Scale back on the number of attractions and, with a few colourful decorations and a little imagination, this very festive afternoon could work with many budgets."
The school debs (why did nobody screen this import at customs?) has spawned its own elaborate black-tied complex of rituals around flowers, gifts, Red Bull and vodka and other such behavioural codes and tokens.
But what is behind the culture of the canapé? Why the complex ritual, the dressing of wealth in a low-cut top, the formality, the excess?
One parent who recently hosted a (modest) 21st birthday party for his son, and who wishes to stay nameless, thinks the trend captures something of the essence of Ireland's post-1990s condition. ... continued overleaf
"I think it's something that is evident right across the board. Family events have changed. The Christening is replacing the wake. And if you like, the 21st is replacing the wedding. The culture is reflected in the nature of this change in family celebrations.
"To a large-extent, this is post-boom behaviour. There's a lot more money out there. Celebration generally has become a much more expensive and very much more organised - and corporate - phenomenon. The 21st and the debs are only phenomena within an entire culture which is much more indulgent when it comes to celebration.
He relates the story of a school sports day that took place last month at an ordinary, community-based city school in Dublin. During a break in the day's events, a helicopter landed on the grounds outside, sparking yelps of curiosity in the children. The principal took to the intercom, telling the pupils not to worry. It wasn't al-Qaeda, he said; only Sarah's daddy arriving for the 2 p.m. three-legged race.
"So you have this chaotic mix of values and aspirations, thrown up by the huge social upheavals we've had over the past 10 years or so. And the 21st is no exception."
In Ireland, the occasion's shift from the private to the public sphere, and the drift from one set of values to another, reached a tidy symbolic apogee when the singer Samantha Mumba hit 21 earlier this year. Mumba is a rich and successful performer. She draws crowds around the globe. In her daily life, she has as much in common with the typical 21-year-old in Dublin as she does with the typical ageing herdsman traipsing the central Asian steppe for a living. At a lavish function at the Four Seasons Hotel in Dublin last January, Mumba hosted a "Moroccan-themed" party attended by an array of singers, actors, models and agents. The photographic rights were sold to a magazine, and tabloid coverage rolled for days. It was described as a society event. As one Irish gossip website noted approvingly, the singer had lifted the 21st out of the "grotty backroom of a local pub" and "made it a glottis Hollywood affair."
They overstated Mumba as pioneer. For once you remove Miss Ireland, Louis Walsh and a small continent of egotism, Samantha Mumba's party slips gently into the wider niche. Questions of adolescence and adulthood, of pathways and junctures, don't necessarily arise. Increasingly, the tacit theme is of wealth and success - as interdependent values - and the projecting of those values to the widest audience. In Samantha Mumba's case the trappings were those of the American movie, of glamour and international high fashion; not a huge leap from the aspired-for affluent middle age that screams from the bow-ties and dresses of more modest 21st parties. Is not all of this precisely a rejection of much of what it has traditionally meant to be 21?
According to Marie Murray, director of psychology at St Vincent's Hospital in Fairview, the phenomenon fits into the need for ritual and the blurring of life's traditional markers, all ultimately feeding on new wealth.
"We do need rituals to mark the passage of our lives and of events. There was a time when religion provided many of these; there were clearer divides around when people moved into adulthood, for example.
"It seems that everything we do, we do in this excessive way, and that is a relatively modern phenomenon. It's very new for us. And when people have more money, they seem to spend it. In a way that didn't happen in the past, because many people who had money remembered the depression or remembered times of want."
And not only must the money be spent, but it must be seen to be spent. "We see that in every aspect of life. It's not divorced from the massive excess of Hallowe'en decorations, Christmas decorations, new cars - there are an awful lot of public statements being made about money. We even see it in people's gardens, with the designer garden and designer garden furniture."
There are two ways of interpreting this process, Murray suggests; one that sees the glass half full and the other that sees it smashed to pieces.
"The first way of looking at it is that this is the exuberance of new wealth. This is the kid who never got a chocolate bar and then eats a hundred, until he's sick. And there are some signs that we might be reaching that point - of overdosing. In that case, it's not that significant. It keeps the money going round in the economy and it means there's a whole generation that knows how to enjoy itself, and which won't die saving for a rainy day. There have also been some links made to uncertainty in the world. We live in such global uncertainty about the future - about ourselves, about the planet, about world peace - although I don't know if it has infiltrated here. But that's one clinical link that has been made.
"The second interpretation is that we've become divorced and detached from what is real. There was a time when we had a connection to the land, we had a connection with a belief system or a faith. There were very strong ideas and ideologies that held us and now the new one is money. There is a feeling that this generation has replaced a sense of belonging and of relationship with objects and with superficiality. Maybe it's an attempt to reassure ourselves or reward ourselves or feel that something is happening in our lives. There are people who will say that what we're actually chasing is happiness, or a sense of family. There will be people who subscribe to both positions. But when you start getting into money like that, you start to think we really have lost it."