Kathy Sheridan: The compulsory ID card has arrived. Since Monday, anyone under 20 who wants to remain in a pub after 9 p.m. must produce a State-produced "age document" - passport, Garda card or driving licence - or risk a fine of up to €300. If you're a young-looking 23-year-old, that includes you.
Meanwhile, the real targets of the ID system, 16- and 17-year-olds, are simply reviewing tactics. They know that "fake" documents - passports with forged pages, altered ID cards - may well be rumbled by the bouncers at clubs and pubs and confiscated, leading to further grief.
Gardaí have traced confiscated documents back to the source - typically a computer-literate schoolboy - and summoned him and his young customers to the station, to warn them off in trenchant language.
Ergo, the hunt is on for "non-fake" IDs. This means a close examination of older siblings' or friends' authentic "age documents", finding the one with the photograph that most resembles them and proceeding as normal.
What makes this situation almost farcical is that many parents not only know all about it but collude with it. Some of the most vigilant and responsible of them deliver and collect their 16- or 17-year-olds to and from the pub, adult club or disco, sometimes even making a detour to pick up "ID" from the child's pal.
Few do it with an easy conscience, of course. Most breathe a sigh of relief when the child reaches 18 and is "legal" at last. In the meantime, they will have negotiated a vast, lonely and treacherous swath of territory virtually unacknowledged in public debate.
The one thing everyone is agreed on is that this country is suffused with alcohol. "Young people" are surveyed to death about their consumption rate and attitudes. Meanwhile, their parents continue to make alcohol - rivers of it - the prerequisite for every event, however trivial or sacred. The 17-year-old with a provisional driving licence is swiftly co-opted as a taxi-driver for bleary-eyed parents tottering out of a dinner party. Twenty-first birthday parties will have as many drunken adults slobbering over the young ones as there are young ones slobbering over one another.
What in the name of heaven can we achieve by banning 16- and 17-year-olds not only from pubs but from alcohol (only 26 per cent of them are allowed a drink at home) until their 18th birthday, then - bang! - unleashing them into the culture we created, one that expects them to get instantly and totally "locked" because it's celebration time? (Just have a look at 18th-birthday cards in the shops).
In the absence of any honest public debate, thinking parents muddle through, riddled with feelings of ignorance and inadequacy in the face of offspring considered old enough to drive a killer car, decide his adult future by filling in a (CAO) form, or die in Iraq to get George Bush re-elected - and who is nonetheless expected to feel the acme of cool among a bunch of 13-year-old gigglers at under-age discos.
The idea of a Leaving Cert student going to "Baby Wesley" (as the south Dublin city underage disco is known scornfully to the "older" ones) induces paroxysms of laughter. Among many normal teenagers, even 16 is considered too old for underage discos because they are dominated by first- and second-years.
There are adult dance clubs and discos around Dublin city now so famously under-age that a cool 18-year-old wouldn't be seen dead in them.
Ask a bunch of thinking 18-year-olds what they would do as parents and they look as perplexed as any. One recalls that during a language immersion trip to French, neither he nor his Irish peers had a drink for a month. The flipside was that their new French friends introduced them to "a lot of hash" instead.
Back home, they say, they would probably drop their own under-age children to a pub - and collect them, of course - because "a pub is better than a field with a naggin in your pocket". Maureen Gaffney quotes a study in which young people were asked to describe the times when they most enjoyed themselves. Time spent with friends, "doing rowdy, loud, crazy, wild things and having a fantastic time", they replied.
There is a particular adolescent thrill in letting go, in being swept away by the group mood, a kind of uncontrollable glee, as if somebody presses "Go" and there is no "Stop" button. But the exuberance and risk-taking of adolescents, says Gaffney, are really just the outer forms of more heroic qualities that are needed to grow up: bravery and courage.
What parent does not find something touching and thought-provoking in there?
How do we channel that magnificent eagerness for life without crushing it?
As the barriers rise around our teenagers, have we anything better to offer them?