In all the talk about the Quality Bus Corridor this week, one large pressure group has remained curiously quiet. This is particularly unusual as they are not a group known for staying quiet on buses; in fact, it is most frequently buses on which they are most vociferous of all. I am talking, of course, about school students, a group of people who have often gathered in large groups to make their presence felt on buses.
Yet when it came to the QBC, they have remained bizarrely and uncharacteristically quiet. From the AA to the Concerned And Ratty Drivers Ignoring Energy Saving (CARDIES), everybody has been giving their tuppence worth about the pros and cons of the super fly way of getting through the suburbs. Whereas commuters aside, it is probably school students that are going to be most severely affected, and not a peep out of them have we heard.
I mean, travel times, customer comfort, lead and ozone levels bedamned - this QBC could seriously affect the social life of people aged 12 to 17 and nobody has raised a single objection on their behalf. Think about it. During the years spent in secondary school, the proportion of the brain used to sort through theorems, strategems, and phonems is about 13 per cent. Whereas the bit that is constantly calculating who your friends are, where they are, and what they're wearing is about 49 per cent, and the opposite sex takes up the rest.
Now the hours of nine till four are, in theory at least, devoted to the exercise of the academic 13 per cent. But the small amount of time allotted to the other 87 per cent of the brain has numerous demands on it, such as meal times, television, arguing with your parents and thumping your siblings. Most teenagers have the misfortune to be singularly lacking in a private income and are thus subjected to the parental home, which means that while the issues of boys, friends and socialising can be thought about constantly, there is very little opportunity for putting the principals into practice.
The one place that has traditionally been reserved for safely integrating that theory and practice has been the bus journey that takes you from your school to your home and back again. Lordy, I had some of my most important, Road-to-Damascus-style moments on the number 45 route. Friendships were made and broken, crushes were obsessed over, boys were flirted with and parties and reputations were created and ruined with a single encounter. And I had the luck to go to a mixed sex school - I believe from friends that attended single sex schools that the bus took on semi-mythical proportions as a dating agency. Of course it wasn't all good - there were the times when I fell out of favour and got ignored, the times when I wasn't cool because I didn't smoke down the back and the times when it seemed that everybody had a boyfriend except me. But mostly it was where I did a lot of my growing up.
So when a reporter from this paper wrote that he travelled from Foxrock into Dublin city centre in 32 minutes, it was immediately obvious that a whole way of life was under threat. Thirty-two minutes? What kind of a bus journey is that? Why you'd hardly have time to flirt with the bus driver before you'd have to get off the bus again.
It is obvious that yet again a hugely influential pressure group have pressed through a measure at the expense of the teenagers of Ireland - parents. These totalitarian giants have been increasingly reactionary in recent years and owing to the fact that a large majority of the population belong to the group, they control most areas of government, the media, and education.
It has become a self-evident truth, accepted without question, that teenagers have to be strictly monitored and marshalled at all times or they will start meeting in groups to converse with Satan or eat babies. The moral decline of the average 15 year old is the subject of conferences and hushed PTA meetings. A newspaper report that a 17 year old was able to purchase drink without ID seemed to suggest to many that school children were now brewing poitin under the bunk beds.
The recent court case which revealed that a group of middle-class teenagers were meeting in the woods to get drunk and give each other blow jobs only confirmed to many that if you let teenagers out of your sight for one minute they are about to start doing terrible things that will jeopardise their future altogether. Of course it's not ideal if young people are doing things that are neither good for them physically or mentally, nor for the right reasons. But teenagers will get hurt, will get upset and will get just a little bit damaged - it's what growing up is all about.
It does not mean that they are not going to turn into perfectly well balanced and confident adults. Some of the tales told by my friends and acquaintances about what they got up to in their youth would make any parent turn pale and yet these people have all turned out just grand. The sad fact is that sometimes people just don't turn out well, or happy, or secure and that is terribly unfair.
But what we have now is a situation where parents live in constant fear that their child is about to get involved in the white slave trade as soon as their back is turned. Even worse is the plight of parents who discover their children have been having underage sex or drinking or cutting school to smoke cigarettes. This was never going to be good news but now they have to deal with the fear that this is the first step on a slippery path to ruin or an emotional scar that is going to hamper their child for life.
As for teenagers, it's just not possible to wrap them up in cotton wool and it's certainly not good for them. In addition, they will be deprived of having a difficult childhood and will thus be unable to make short films, write novels or become a multi-million pound entrepeneur. So bring back the bus journey that lasts two hours, eats into your homework time and brings you into contact with boys and cigarettes and people with multiple piercings. We've got to fight for the right to be led astray on the 46A.