Middle-class Bastards.

They rant a lot about chavs in the UK, don't they? Oooh, look, the peasants are revolting, especially since Mike Skinner's got a new album out. The feckin' working classes, eh? Dropping babies because it's beneficial to benefits. Driving other people's hatchbacks into trees. Contributing to the obesity pandemic, one chip at a time.

Over the water in Ireland, we have a similar problem with the middle-classes.

The middle-class is a new thing in Ireland. We only had one class up to about fifteen years ago: The Dirt Poor. We had rich people too, but not enough to make up an upper-class; besides, it's hard to lump together the Taoiseach and Slab Murphy.

Still, the Dirt Poor were happy. We went about our day to day business - queueing at the dole office, scraping together the price of a pint, helping elderly ladies across the street, and setting up soul bands.


Then this fella came along


And all was lost.

Now we can't move outside our houses for fear of being run over by hoodied fourteen-year-olds in Honda Civics or their mammies' jeeps. We don't really have a working class in Ireland now, I've deduced. I've deduced that by looking out of my window at my council estate neighbours, most of whom have a car or two in their driveways. Jesus, I can't talk. I've got broadband and an expensive video game habit. I doubt I'm living in a strange "affluent working class" bubble. The feckers in Fatima Mansions probably have broadband too.

A close friend of mine is a secondary school teacher. Recently in her school, there's been a complete breakdown in order - kids smoke, talk loudly over Teacher's lessons, and shit in dustbins, all without punishment. Teacher works in a middle-class rural neighbourhood, not in an inner city school. She's tough as nails, but all her energy goes into projecting such a diamond-hard exterior, because she can't do anything to keep the children she teaches under control. She can't do that because their parents refuse to have any teacher tell their children what to do.

What the fuck is this insanity? Recently my (working class, three-car-family) cousin said that his mother told him that if his headmaster berated him, he should retaliate by telling him to fuck off.

That's my generation, people. A motley crew of spoiled bastards who shit in classroom dustbins and kill their peers outside nightclubs. Perhaps we're not used to money in Ireland. Perhaps we just don't know what to do with it, apart from throw ridiculous gifts at our kids - a family skiing holiday, a school trip to Barcelona, a Toyota Corolla, a post Leaving Cert non-supervised two-weeker in Tenerife.

A good recession might slap some manners into us.

When I was about fourteen, I lusted after a pair of Nike Airs, but at £60, they were well out of my mother's price range. My best friend was in a similar situation, and I remember both of us tearfully swearing that if we had to eat baked beans for weeks, we'd buy our kids whatever clothes they needed to fit in with the nobs at school.

I laugh now - I've grown out of such overly simplistic views on parenting. Why no one else in Ireland has done so with me is beyond me.