Student Special: "It is how we apply our intelligence, our capabilities, and our creativity that counts"

This is the start of a new academic year, in universities and colleges all over Ireland, and further afield. It is a moment of great importance for young students, many of whom have emerged from second-level education here with their sanity barely intact.

They deserve our sympathy. They are not to blame for the horrible limitations of secondary school education here, and the regime that is imposed by the Leaving Cert examination as a way of acquiring a place in college. But those days are over. Anyone starting in third-level is crossing a threshold. Entering adult life.

Or at least they should be. But it isn’t necessarily that simple. There has been a gradual erosion of the idea of youthful independence, so that – in many ways – students now are far less confident in themselves, and in their ability to go it alone, than was the case, say, 20 or 30 years ago.

Some of this has to do with social conditions – and in particular with the housing shortage, which conspires to prevent people from leaving home properly when they emerge into their college or early working years. And it has to do, in particular, with the punitive cost of renting an apartment or a flat and the absurd hoops through which you have to jump to do it, in this twisted, paranoid, ultra-exploitative, modern capitalist era.

But it isn’t only that. There has been, it often seems to me, a process of infantilisation going on in western culture, with the authorities, and parents, and all sorts of other often confused or plain silly vested interests, becoming more and more unnecessarily protective of people at the age of 19, 20 or 21.

Why? One of the most important things we will ever have to do is learn to stand on our own two feet. And the sooner we do it, in many ways, the better.

At the age of eighteen, you can drive a car. You’re entitled to vote. You can have a legal sup of the hard stuff. In the US you can bear arms (as long as they’re long guns!). Well, if you’re entitled to do any and all of that, you’re ready to function on your own – or you should be. If you were in Russia or indeed Ukraine, you could be dragooned into the army and shot dead.

So it kinda makes sense to get a move on. Life is out there to be lived.

A DIFFERENT DIRECTION

This is not to suggest that there is anything wrong with having a loving parent or two, who’ll stick up for you if anything does go wrong. But once you leave school, the logical next step is to take proper responsibility for shaping your own world.

You need to think for yourself. Go beyond the myths. Begin to decide what you believe in. But it is not all about introspection.

The opportunity is huge, when you’re in college, to go out and enjoy yourself. Explore life’s nooks and crannies. Get involved with strangers. Stop relying on others to clean up after you. Open up to different possibilities and new friendships. Get creative. Understand that life is work, but it also can be fun.

Every individual has immense, even unique, potential. Look, it’s coming out your ears! But you need to put the graft in, to realise it fully. There’s a whole world of possibilities in front of you. Don’t wait for them to come to you.  The time to start finding your range is now.

There will come a time when you ask yourself: what the hell was all of that malarkey about ‘points’?  But, on the run-up to the Leaving Cert exams, it can seem hugely important. All around you, people are encouraging you to believe that it is. Teachers want you to focus, work hard and do well. Parents, mostly, want that even more ardently.

Well, what’s done is done. You are now on a course. You may even be in a college. However, at the age of 18 or 19, it’s important to remember that nothing is written in stone. You may want to be a doctor today, but in two years time – who knows? It may not be a discipline that you are cut out for.

The work you’re studying for may look good on paper. You might even get well paid, if you see it through. But is it really how you want to spend your days?

Maybe, for example, it hadn’t ever occurred to you before starting the degree course that being a dentist involves a lot of responsibility with not a lot of fun attached. Are you really looking forward to spending your life looking into other people’s mouths? Wrestling to get a tooth out? All that blood to deal with!

You might be better joining a rock ’n’ roll band instead. And by this time in 2028, have your first Electric Picnic appearance under your belt. Record companies might be sniffing. A song or a track could be in the process of going viral. Better start learning to sing then!

There was so much Irish talent on display at this year’s EP that this is by no means a far-fetched thought. A few years ago, Robbie Cunningham and Ross McNerney were teachers. Oisin McCaffrey was working as a data scientist in Pfizer. Good gigs to fall back on, maybe. But their band, Amble, are now among the leading acts in Stradbally.

CMAT, another star of EP, went to Trinity College. She didn’t hang around to finish her degree, instead embarking on a career as a musician and a songwriter, while working in low level jobs to keep the wolf from the door. I think we can say that, in moving on, she made the correct decision.

Denise Chaila started in college, and later decided that she didn’t need to stick with the programme in UCG. She went on to become one of the country’s most important artists of the past fifteen years. The depth of her intelligence is no less for having skipped the academic grind. I’ve just been making the final edits to our upcoming book, History In The Making: The Book of Hot Press Interviews. In it, we are running Denise’s spell-binding interview with Michael D. Higgins, conducted when he was President of Ireland.

President Michael D Higgins with Denise Chaila by Miguel Ruiz

It is an astonishingly powerful piece, brilliantly curated by Denise. It makes the case for independent thinking better than almost anything I have read.

Hozier was another Trinity drop-out. He’s done okay. Van Morrison, Rory Gallagher, Philip Lynott, Bob Geldof, Philip Chevron, Bono, Sinéad O’Connor, Dolores O’Riordan, Glen Hansard, Imelda May, Damien Dempsey – not a graduate among them.

None of this is by way of making any kind of recommendation. It is, rather, to emphasise that life sometimes takes us off in a different direction; and to suggest that perhaps the most important thing of all is to have a really good work ethic. It is how we apply our intelligence, our capabilities, and our creativity that counts.

College does work too. Members of Fontaines D.C. attended BIMM, in the Liberties area, south of the Liffey, in Dublin. That’s where the band came together, connecting first through their shared love of poetry. They’re an impressive mix, in terms of background, with two of the band coming from Mayo (Conor Deegan and Tom Coll), one from Monaghan (Conor Curley), one from Skerries, though born in England (Grian Chatten) and one via Madrid, Spain (Carlos O’Connell). But the important thing is that they gelled, in a way that no one – looking at a line-up of suspects – could possibly have predicted. And then they committed. This was it. They were not going to falter – and they haven’t.

The band ended their Electric Picnic headlining slot last weekend with an announcement that they are playing Slane Castle, in June 2027 – it’s now two shows, with a strongly Irish-leaning supporting cast that includes Damien Dempsey, and the rapidly growing phenomenon that is, or that are, Madra Salach, alongside the marvellous Hayley Williams, originally of Paramore.

Well, not everyone can be Colin Farrell, Saoirse Ronan, John Carney or Sharon Horgan. We cannot all be wildly successful artists. But we should aspire to becoming the very best we can be at whatever it is that we choose to do. Because the better we become, and the harder we work, the more likely we are to make a serious contribution to addressing all of the enormous and potentially crushing challenges that the world is facing, as we enter the autumn of 2026

TRUMP’S GOONS

Which brings us to another reason to feel sympathy towards those who are arriving into the increasingly grim world of adulthood.

There are a lot of good people in the world, but it is honestly no exaggeration to say that evil forces are winning right now and wreaking terrible, sometimes unspeakable damage. We have entered what may in the long run be recognised as a grotesque era of fascist oligarchs, autocrats and butchers.

A lot will hinge on the final few months of this year, and whether or not it is possible for those who are opposed to everything that Donald Trump stands for to win back control of either Congress or the Senate – or preferably both – in the upcoming mid-term elections in the USA. If they fail, then darkness will likely descend, of a kind we have not known since the Second World War.

The most corrupt, venal, aggressive and demonstrably immoral – not to mention rock solid stupid – President in the history of the United States of America will be free to rob and steal and murder on a whim, and to create further utterly self-serving, brutal havoc and chaos, at the expense not just of ordinary citizens across the world, but of the planet itself.

And here’s what’s potentially worse. Even if the American people successfully mobilise and vote against Trump in sufficient numbers, there is no guarantee that he – and the power-hungry, racially and religiously motivated thugs he has assembled around him – will accept it. They have been busily paving the way, and concocting the narrative, to make the claim that the vote in these elections has been tampered with, and that the election is rigged and therefore void. They are very likely to have the U.S army prepared, and the ICE goons on the ground primed for action, and to attempt a coup that will signal the end – at least temporarily and maybe forever – of democracy in the United States of America.

Meanwhile, the butchery will go on in Gaza. Land will be stolen by Israel in the West Bank. Russia will be enabled in their attempt to subjugate Ukraine. Surveillance through Big Tech will reach unprecedented levels. People will be slung in jail for even daring to say that they oppose what is happening.

The ground is already being laid. The Democrats are being demonised as enemies of the people, just as those who support Palestine are, shockingly – in the UK and parts of Europe – being locked up as terrorists.

And on top of all that, AI is coming to get you. Data centres are drinking your water. Russia is pursuing its hybrid war. Trump’s goons are interfering in elections all over the world. The weather gods have had enough and tragedies are being heaped on top of disasters, on top of catastrophes. I am reminded of ‘Oh, California’, a song written by Dave Ackles, all the way back in 1972.

“They say it’s the way of the future,”  he sang, “Ah, but the future is looking grim/ ‘Cause when the oil meets the Redwoods/ Then the sun grows dim/ Then I can warn ya/ We’re all gonna live in California!/ Wherever we live it’s California!/ Where the road to tomorrow/ Is a dead end doubt/ If we won’t change the route/ Let’s all be happy/ Until the sun goes out.”

The only answer, friends, is to mobilise, use every diplomatic channel available fearlessly and to the max, and be as prepared for the worst as we can ever be, on this small and still beautiful island off the west coast of Europe. But one fears that the real action will be elsewhere – and that all we will be able to do, when the dread hour comes at last, is watch in horror – and hope that the consequences are not totally, utterly and completely irreparable.

Happy studies.