Frank McNally feels sorry for teenagers today, living as they do under the threat of global warming and having to worry constantly about the future of the planet.
Life was so much simpler for those us who grew up in the 1970s. At that time, geopolitics barely impinged on our consciousness. Indeed, if it hadn't been for the third world war, then imminent, we would have had nothing to worry about at all (except Northern Ireland).
It seems so quaint now. But a centrepiece of my year in the late 1970s was the annual Civil Defence seminar, at which leaders of the community were trained to monitor radiation levels during the nuclear winter that would soon descend.
Strictly speaking, my father was the only community leader in our house. Unfortunately, from an early age, he had suffered from a rare allergy that made him incapable of sitting in a classroom for any length. So with the qualities that made him a leader, he always delegated his nuclear seminar invitation to me.
The working assumption at the seminars was that Ireland would not be attacked directly. But we were in the flight path of the intercontinental ballistic missiles, so unplanned stop-overs at Shannon and elsewhere could not be ruled out. Besides, wherever the bombs fell, nowhere would be safe from the red dust.
It wouldn't be red in real life, of course, only in the little line drawings that illustrated the Civil Defence manual, which looked a cheap production even by the standards of the time. In the drawings, the civilian population was portrayed safely indoors, sitting in the most central room of each house - the "refuge room" - while outside, red dust gathered on the sandbags they had piled against the walls before retreating.
In reality, the dust would be an invisible enemy. "It cannot be seen or felt," warned the manual, "but we have instruments to tell us when it is about." This is where the community leaders came in, though I remember thinking that if the manual was a guide to quality of our equipment, we were all in trouble.
The local seminar was held in a place that, were it ever the scene of a major news story, would be described by reporters as "the normally sleepy town of Ballybay". Chosen for its centrality, Ballybay was the refuge room of Co Monaghan. While there is a temptation to exaggerate how quiet it was in the 1970s, suffice to say that it was as good a place as any to contemplate the prospect of a post-nuclear wasteland.
Community leaders aside, the Civil Defence plan was heavily dependent on Radio Éireann, as it was still known. In the event of an emergency, the booklet said, the station would broadcast official warnings. There would be an advance warning, one hour before the fall-out reached Ireland, and a final warning to say that the fall-out had descended.
Then it would time for the community leaders to spring into action, making short forays outside with our Geiger counters, measuring radiation levels in selected spots, and pausing only to shoot looters. OK, I made the last bit up. We weren't that important: shooting looters would be somebody else's job. We were functionaries. Our role was just to relay the readings to Dublin, assuming Dublin still existed.
Looking back now, I don't know how real the danger of a US-Soviet conflict was. But the Cold War still raged, with notorious incidents such as the assassination of a Bulgarian dissident in London by poison-tipped umbrella. Meanwhile, the competing propaganda of the superpowers was at an all-time high.
It was easier to find Radio Moscow on the medium-wave dial than an Irish station playing pop records. You didn't even need a radio. Around that time I bought a second-hand electric guitar from a school-friend, who was not a Soviet agent (as far as I know). But when you switched the amplifier on at night, it picked up Radio Moscow - I swear - broadcasting next week's news around the clock.
At any rate, the threat of war soon receded. Or maybe it was just that, given the state of the Irish economy in the early 1980s, the prospect of nuclear destruction was no longer as unattractive as it once seemed. Whatever the reason, the seminars ceased. A few years later, the Berlin Wall came down and the Eastern bloc welcomed a new era of democracy in which shadowy assassinations in London would be a thing of the past.
A decade further on and, instead of Communist missiles, Ballybay was being targeted by post-Communist migrants: hundreds of them, from Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, the Czech Republic and Poland. Like many Irish towns and villages, it is now unrecognisable from its former self. But it's not all good news, of course, and the worry is that the town's new-found vibrancy has had a dramatic effect on the size of its carbon footprint.