Keith Duggan Sideline Cut It has been fun driving across the country in recent months seeing which countries are to be hosted by which towns throughout the Special Olympics.

These signs were a great innovation and the foreign, eye-catching names add a touch of the exotic to the maudlin and secretive provincial towns that dominate this island.

News that the Iraqi team had to pull out of the games for obvious reasons and would therefore not be arriving in Larne broke this week.

The good citizens of Larne were understandably dismayed by the withdrawal as they were looking forward to showing their put upon guests a high time for the duration of the festival.

Still, given the traditional global perception of the wee North, the idea of sending the Iraqis to the Six Counties was kind of amusing.

You can just imagine the family of an Iraqi shot putter, say, crouching down in Baghdad as coalition missiles rain over them with the promise of days of endless shot putting in democratic sunshine should they survive. Debris falling, rockets screaming overhead, the very walls shaking and the paternal figure with his arms around his family offering the comforting words, "Could be worse, folks. At least we're not in Northern Ireland."

Still, the idea of weary voyagers arriving from every corner of the globe and ending up in John B Keane's Listowel or Tom Murphy's Tuam is intriguing and the potential for tall and hilarious tales that will sustain the various host places for generations to come endless.

Only 30 years ago, such a massive operation would have been unimaginable and at the very least would have had the host towns trembling in anticipation and curiosity as to whom and what would arrive for months beforehand.

Joe Duffy was on the radio yesterday afternoon presenting a horrifying and gripping phone-in show about the casual night-life violence that has ruined so many lives here in recent years.

Parents of kids who never came home after heading for a night on the town, parents of kids who perpetrated acts of seemingly random and sickening violence all spoke with moving honesty and heartbreak about the way their lives now hinged on the consequences of these brief and immense bursts of violence.

The pain in those voices.

When Joe Duffy is whimsical and does that high-pitched laugh thing like he is having his toes tickled by a feather duster, he can make you itchy but on days like this, his talk show seems a necessary and invaluable barometer for what people in this country are feeling and fearing.

It was a cathartic process, with a stream of people ringing in with their truly terrible and appalling stories of street violence that more often than not robbed them of a loved one.

It was hard to imagine that it was in this country that these acts took place.

It made for sobering listening, driving across mid-Ulster on a glorious April day with these Special Olympic "host town" signs promising the traditional Irish virtues that we like to sing up - welcomes and friendliness and hospitality. Irish eyes, etc.

And the bounty of goodwill and volunteerism suggests there should be a surfeit of such qualities when the athletic teams begin to arrive. Despite the concentration on the evidence of diminishing largesse and increasing shallowness and a general guarded meanness creeping into Irish society in the past 15 or 20 years, people in this country are still capable of extending extraordinary kindness to strangers.

The echo, at least, of the old principle of watching out for (as well as just plain watching) your neighbour can still be heard. The many visitors for whom Ireland may only have been a name, or less, are certain to feel the warmth of that side of Irish life when the Games begin.

But the chilling stories as heard on Liveline are another potent and all-too-real fact of Irish life.

For some reason, the idea of hosting a major and celebratory international sports festival at the same time as random night-life barbarism is so prevalent just stuck with me.

It is only natural that the Olympic guests will be curious to learn a little about the host nation.

But if they were to ask us, "Is Ireland a happy country?" What should or could we in all honesty reply? Those 40 minutes of radio alone offer a substantive thesis that something is badly wrong. Why are so many young Irish people so absolutely seething and loathing with rage? We all still laugh fondly at the memory of the proposals that Ireland should bid to host the summer Olympics in the early and mid-90s. Personally, I thought it was a fantastic idea and am convinced that if we had bid, we would have won because God has a sense of humour.

And watching the spectacle of just how monumentally we would screw up would have been worth it. That doomed proposal probably marked the beginning of the time that we began to take ourselves hyper-seriously as a country, as a player.

For all the many things that are badly wrong, Ireland has developed a lot since then and the ability and willingness to laugh at ourselves seems to have disappeared.

The Special Olympics will offer a chance to showcase Ireland and undo some of the negative international relations caused by the immigrant arrivals here over the past decade. And it will allow us to consolidate the image of ourselves as a nation of sports lovers. Garrulous, loud, loveable, the best fans in the world.

It is a notion at severe odds with that of deeply angry kids, emotionally dispossessed, stalking the night streets for the cold, numb sport of inflicting harm on other people.

This is probably a tenuous link but I would love to know if there is any co-relation between these frightening and perhaps frightened young people and the general decline in sports participation in the last 20 years.

This is not to presume that such pent-up aggression could or should be transferred to the legitimate theatre of the playing field; obviously, the problems from which such aggression originates runs way too deep for a mere game to cure.

But the sense of self-worth, of achievement, of belonging and of respecting the rights of others to flourish around you; these are all vital qualities that define sport. And of course, we shall all see the joy and significance of them when the Games begin.

Hosting an event of this magnitude appears to be something that Ireland is taking in its stride.

The towns will bear their hosts easily. It will be no big deal and people will expect the event to be a success and will be pleased when it is.

And it just seems disquieting that this ultimate expression of community should come to blossom at the very time that a significant minority of young Irish people have not the faintest sense of what community is.