Madam, - Having completed my Irish secondary-school education just five years ago, I could not help being appalled by the voluntary display of teenage female skin in Dublin city centre last Wednesday evening.
Hordes of loud and unruly teenagers, most of whom were presumably Junior Certificate candidates celebrating their results, were difficult to avoid in Temple Bar, O'Connell Street and other city centre areas. The skimpy "dresses" worn by many of the - often drunken - 15- and 16-year-old girls resembled small bathroom towels wrapped tightly around their still-developing bodies.
This choice of clothing - or rather lack of it - was not some declaration of independence and liberation in a prosperous post-Catholic Irish State by a group of knowing, self-assured young women, but more a shock tactic symptomatic of a generation besotted by Paris Hilton Co who are oversexed, yet sexually immature in an era in which juveniles desperately seek approval, acceptance and attention via all the wrong channels.
Dressed as they were, and clearly under the influence of alcohol, these girls were provoking the unwanted attention of their male peers - or, indeed, that of men much older than themselves. I shudder at the thought of parents having actually allowed their daughters to leave home looking the way these girls did last Wednesday evening. - Yours, etc,
SHEILA CASEY,
Zurich,
Switzerland.