`Did you see her? She was wearing those tracksuit bottoms and a tank top. What a slapper!"
"What d'ya mean, go to the PLC in Ballywhatsitsname? Like, hello, you really think it'd be safe for me to walk down a street there?"
"C'mon Dad, how could you understand? I mean, nothing personal, but you are a boggerman."
Teenagers - refreshingly candid or what?
But listen closely sometime to some of the banter, and you might detect a worrying theme - a theme of snobbery, where whole groups of people are dismissed on the basis of the clothes they wear, the places they live, the way they speak, and the kind of third-level institution they go to.
And if you're a liberal-minded parent who was delighted that time they fasted for Rwanda or joined the school's Justice and Peace group, you might wonder, where did this prejudice come from? You might also go on to ask, how can we fight it?
It's become a truism to say that Ireland is a divided society, with class divisions getting more marked all the time in our Celtic Tiger economy. We're uncomfortably aware of a racism that affects attitudes to Travellers and "ethnic" Irish people and is becoming more marked as refugees arrive from eastern Europe and elsewhere.
Yet when you discover that your teenager truly is afraid of venturing into a certain part of Dublin because of its perceived danger, at first you're inclined to laugh. Just as you do at those Northside/ Southside jokes, until you realise that some people really do take this stuff seriously.
Vivian Cassells, the guidance counsellor who ran the Points Race helpline for The Irish Times in August and September, is acutely aware of the way teenage snobbery affects decisions about third-level studies. "The Southside Dublin attitude is `we don't cross the Liffey'. Lots of Dubliners have the attitude that if you live beside a university, you have a God-given right to go to it.
"Many students simply will not consider a course that carries a diploma rather than a degree, and will fill in only the degree section of the CAO form. It's unbelievable how widespread this attitude is - the refusal to even look at diploma courses that might well lead on to the university degree course they want. And it's sad, the number of people willing to repeat the Leaving Cert course, rather than take the route of a diploma."
There is widespread and irrational snobbery about RTCs - irrational, because it's not reflected in the world of business, which knows the value of specific diplomas perfectly well. Cassells despairs of convincing teens and their parents not to be "points snobs".
"Courses cannot be judged by the points they attract," he says, citing an excellent RTC computer course where the entry points threshold was just 200 this year; the course will be dismissed by many for just that reason.
This kind of educational snobbery hurts mainly the student, whose blinkered approach cuts him or her off from a wide range of opportunities. But a more everyday kind of snobbery perpetuates our already deeply unequal society.
A few years ago, "everybody" knew that shiny tracksuits were social death - except, of course, the people who liked them and happily wore them. Worn by members of most social groups in the US, here they became a badge of being working class, and some children as young as nine and 10 would sneer at those who wore them. Currently, it's considered "slapperish" by some teenage girls to wear a skirt during the day; a certain brand of tracksuit bottom, teamed with a tank top, is deemed, well, shiny-tracksuitish.
Kathleen Lynch of the Equality Studies Centre in UCD explains that categorising people by image is the norm in urban areas, where - unlike in rural Ireland - people aren't known personally to one another. And accent and clothes are the two main "signifiers" of image.
The other way people in Ireland's urban areas categorise each other, of course, is by address - which is why Dublin's Irishtown and Ringsend sometimes become Sandymount in estate agents' brochures, why people get upset at being postally moved from Templeogue to Dublin 24. And such is the class segregation in housing that a child living in one part of Dublin might never meet people of another social class - and might be totally unaware of the level of privilege they enjoy.
The urban/rural divide exists as well, of course, but now that so many "culchies" have become "Dubs", there seems to be less tension in the relationship.
John Baker, who also works in UCD's Equality Studies Centre, says he is in no doubt that even casual snobbery can be damaging to marginalised groups. Snobbery is the root of much comedy, from Kerryman jokes to TV shows like Upwardly Mobile. But snobbery is no joke "where it reinforces the general dominance of one group over another in society". And the Equality Studies Centre starts from the premise that ours is a highly class stratified, unequal society.
It is not surprising that the attitudes of many Irish teenagers mirror those in adult society. There is another factor, too: belonging to a group is all-important for teens, and all groups tend to exclude outsiders. A study by Kathleen Lynch on "Equality and the Social Climate of Schools" will tell us a great deal more about those attitudes when it is published next year.
Meantime, the civics course recently introduced into second-level schools by the Department of Education may go some way to raising teenage awareness about these issues - though some experts say the course should be taught by teachers with special training. Away from school, if you observe that your teenager is a snob, it's probably time to re-examine your own social conscience, to raise and discuss the issue, to challenge attitudes. (Try not to lecture, though - teenagers are just as defensive about being labelled "snobs" as most adults.) If you're broaching the issue, don't forget Eastenders: for many teenagers, the recent Oirish episodes were a crash course in being on the wrong end of a stereotype.
