One felt a certain amusement on hearing that almost 50% of Irish children had encountered some form of bullying. Hot news, eh? No different from the rest of us you might say. And you’d be right. As I’ve said before, viciousness and bile and anger are dominant characteristics of Irish society in the noughties. Welcome to the club, kids…

Lots of people have great expectations of Irish education. Some even see it as an engine that can be harnessed to change society. Rubbish, I say. Irish society is what it is. And Irish education reflects Irish society.
Certain sociologists say that Irish education is socially reproductive. That is, the rich succeed and the not-rich don’t. Well, that’s true. But it isn’t the schooling that creates the effect. Irish education simply and efficiently reproduces the society in which it operates.
So, just hold that thought while we consider the issue of bullying and intimidation.
The findings were an accidental outcome of other research being conducted on more general issues. The Irish researchers just added in a number of questions to do with bullying. They were surprised by the results…
I’ll tell ya this, a lot more research will follow and from this little piggy’s perspective, it should examine how bullying of children simply mimics the bullying of adults.

ASSASSINS FOR HIRE
By this I don’t just mean the headline stuff that winds up before labour relations commissioners. No, I’m talking about something more toxic and pervasive, something that oozes out of cracks in the social fabric, something that stains every function of society.
It’s everywhere.
If schools are sites of fear for many children, so too are workplaces for many adults. Threatening and anti-social behaviour we know about. But it isn’t just overt thuggery. There’s a hundred strands to this. Teenagers can be intimidated by violence, that’s for sure. But equally, they can be bullied and abused by text messages and Bebo pages and more.
Adults are no different. Why resort to physical aggression when you can intimidate by text, email, YouTube or MySpace, and behind any mask you care to wear, so the victim doesn’t even necessarily know who’s doing them in?
It neatly dovetails with a phenomenon identified by researchers into the use of gaming consoles – some young gamers appear to have lost the capacity to separate the fictions of games from the facts of life.
At the extreme end of this phenomenon, apparently there is a small number of assassins-for-hire who game all day, except when they’re hired for a hit. There is some speculation that, thanks to doing nothing other than games and drugs, they don’t actually understand that the people they waste can’t get up after they leave, as they would in games. It’s believable.
The inability to understand that actions have consequences and that nothing exists in isolation is a core characteristic shared by schoolyard and workplace bullies, Liveliners, bloggers, happy slappers, political and celebrity journos, paparazzi and, if the treatment of Bertie Ahern’s former secretary Gráinne Carruth is anything to judge by, tribunal lawyers.

NEW BREED OF ABUSERS
The causes or triggers for this irresponsibility, endemic viciousness and physical or mental thuggery are less clear. What’s the problem? Why, for example, would thugs opposed to the Lisbon treaty occupy a peaceful meeting, drown out speakers with loud hailers and then chase and attack and batter Pronnsias de Rossa, a man now in late middle age?
I mean, what’s the point? Why are they so angry, if that is the correct word? Or is it just that they are indeed vicious, unreconstructed bullies, who want to impose themselves on anyone with whom they disagree?
If it were all about corruption, you might understand, but de Rossa is as far away from all of that as it is possible to be.
If it were about abuse, you might have a smidgen of sympathy – but what then of the rank abuse visited by bloggers on Max Gogarty? Go on, Google it. You’ll find a perfect case of mob rule, and bullying of a well-meaning 19 year old kid, via the internet.
We are in danger of losing any sense of perspective and justice. The internet has given free reign to a lot of disturbed and dangerous people. The new breed of abusers hide behind pseudonyms and ‘comments’. Bullies manipulate over long distance. And everywhere the tabloids plunder. It’s a fetid swamp, one that fosters the mob and festers prejudice, racism, intolerance, ignorance and cruelty.
We have some choices to make about the way we live. But above all we have to rediscover a sense of individual and collective responsibility. So hear this: words and actions have consequences. Everyone should have to answer for what they say and do, and that means you too.
If you can’t say it to someone’s face, don’t say it. Before you send an email or post a fetid, insulting or ill-founded comment, pause to think.
Before we expect adolescents to behave themselves in their classrooms and playgrounds and on their phones and their Bebo sites, we oughtta make sure we behave ourselves…
Take care out there.