FOR A change, some good news. Young Ireland is alive and well and largely composed of stand up comedians. This intelligence I bear from a recent visit to the college at Belfield where I was a guest speaker at a student debate.
The invitation came from a nice woman at Hot Press magazine. When she called I thought I was about to achieve my life's ambition of a question and answer appearance in their delightfully zany Mad Hatter slot. Even that Times Square chap across the way has done it, sporting a fine caubeen, so why not me?
But no, this was a more solemn undertaking, or so I thought. Yes, I had a window in my diary: I'll be there. It was some time since I had been to the Belfield campus, now coming to resemble a small city.
In the old UCD at Earlsfort Terrace the lecture halls had romantic names like the Kevin Barry Room or intriguing ones such as the Physics Theatre (I never saw a science lecturer darken its door).
But what I still call the new campus has Theatre L, M and so on. I sought out the appropriate initial, dispiritedly expecting a small lunchtime crowd, the hard core who had no boyfriends or girlfriends and nothing better to do like playing table football.
Imagine my surprise, dear reader, when I entered to discover the massive hall was "dubh le daoine". There was a great buzz in the air. A further surprise awaited: this was not just a Hot Press gig but a co production, so to speak, with the Literary and Historical Society.
The idea for a series of lunchtime debates came from the Students' Union and a beer company was providing funds and refreshment.
For a couple of years in my youth I was a stalwart of that society, but this was not the "L&H" of yore, where young men wore monkey suits and talked into their chests to make their voices deeper.
If you go to the Law Library any day you will discover some were left like that.
I understand the L&H still has traditional debates in the evening, but the lunchtime atmosphere was informal and the auditor, a very pleasant young man, conducted the proceedings more like the compere of a late night chat show than the ceann comhairle/house speaker model of old.
It was more Jay Leno than Henry Grattan Conan O'Brien, not Edmund Burke. A young woman in leather gave vouchers for free beer to everyone who spoke from the floor.
The motion had the same role in the proceedings as the basic melody in a jazz number. Even to tell you what it was over emphasises its importance but I suppose I'll have to. The proposition was that the Michael Collins movie would have a negative impact on Anglo Irish relations.
DON'T stop reading: I know that subject has been done to death as surely as the Laughing Boy himself on the road at Beal na Blath.
The best speech, if you can call it a speech, was made by a young man who hadn't seen the film. He embarked on a tour de force of free association, constructing a fantasy world where Michael Collins was replaced by John Bruton who wore down Lloyd George by boring him into submission and escaped back to Ireland with the North under his oxter.
Along the way there were lurid and hilarious observations on other public figures such as Charles Haughey, Maggie Thatcher and members of the present Government. No one was spared. Several other speakers contributed in the same vein: Myles na Gopaleen meets Johnny Rotten with Lenny Bruce as referee. Not all their comments and observations could be repeated in a family newspaper, indeed they would shrivel and die in the medium of cold print. But it was splendid fun, enormously invigorating and in a strange way a source of hope.
The future ruling class, of which that L&H audience was a prime component, is optimistic, self confident and doesn't take itself too seriously. The old L&H was in its way a splendid institution also but some of those young chaps, now older and greyer, seemed to have had their gravitas injection at birth.
In those days, the L&H was playground cum training ground for the ruling elite. The niceties of procedure were Holy Writ and I can still hear myself mouthing the mandatory formula for an emergency debate: "Mr Auditor, sir, I wish to propose the suspension of standing orders to introduce the following motion..."
The main emotion that comes back to me is fear. The heckling was brilliant but savage. No Roman crowd ever taunted a Christian or urged on a lion like those Saturday night backbenchers. Since coming through that fire I have been able to eyeball gun toting Turkish security men, Iranian revolutionaries and the Kremlin's special police without a qualm.
But back to the present generation whose role model is the free floating, irreverent, been there done that bought the T shirt stand up comedian. The ethos of this age is captured only on those late night weekend television shows with their wild and uncontrollable humour and shocking stunts. The newspapers of these islands, held in thrall by the cult of seriousness, are for the most part blissfully unaware of it.
Each decade has its own world view: Hemingway caught the 1920s combination of post war despair and live for today hedonism in The Sun Also Rises; the new permissiveness and flower power of the 1960s we all know about; the vaunted Punk Era was self consciously rude and arrogant and something of a fraud.
IF I could compare the ethos of today with another time it would be with the 1930s when the glory days of Michael Collins and the struggle for independence had receded. There was no great cause to die for, although the young UCD poet Charlie Donnelly found one in Spain.
The spirit of that lunchtime debate was not unlike Flann O'Brien's description of the L&H in the 1930s in At Swim Two Birds as "a body that met every Saturday night for the purpose of debate and disputation; its meetings, however, were availed of by many hundreds of students for shouting, horseplay, singing and the use of words, actions and gestures contrary to the usages of Christians".
The late teens and early 20s age group these days have no great cause to die for either, thank goodness. They are repelled by the bourgeois banalities of politics and sceptical of holy men with feet of clay. They have taken refuge in the surreal world of irreverent humour, scabrous and shocking on the surface but also containing, if you stay to listen, elements of gentleness and even wisdom. To coin a phrase (order me up a Polish accent please): "Young people of Ireland, I love you."