On Monday evening a fight involving past and current pupils from two Dublin fee-paying schools took place outside Kiely’s pub in Donnybrook. The occasion was a Senior Cup match between St Michael’s College and Terenure College, institutions so fundamentally alike that their rivalry runs shallow but strong. Gardaí were summoned, but made no arrests.
Two days later, there was another incident: a brawl between supporters of Newbridge College and Presentation College Bray, also outside Kiely’s. This time four young men were arrested for public order offences.
Cameraphone footage of the first Kiely’s clash did the rounds on social media. The response mingled hauteur and schadenfreude. “Not what you expect after an #SCT game,” said one Twitter user. “Private school brats,” said another.
Certain people, of course, are always delighted when private-school boys act like thugs, revealing – so the argument goes – that the high-minded rhetoric about sportsmanship and gentlemanly conduct espoused by such schools is nothing but hypocrisy.
There is nothing to distinguish this melee from the sort of thing that happens every Saturday night on Dame Street
Certainly such rhetoric is never in short supply. In the aftermath of the first incident the president of the Blackrock College Union, Eunan O’Carroll, dispatched an email reminding past pupils to “take responsibility” for their behaviour at upcoming matches, and to bear in mind “the tradition and ethos of the college”.
He noted that the “unruly actions of a few can cause untold damage to the school they represent and at the same time tarnish all the pupils, both present and past”.
Brian Murphy
This August it will be 18 years since Brian Murphy died as a result of injuries sustained in a fight outside Anabel’s nightclub at the Burlington Hotel in Dublin. Four graduates of Blackrock College were eventually charged in relation to their role in Murphy’s death.
The Anabel’s case provoked a rancourous debate about the role of fee-paying rugby schools in our national life. Such schools, it was argued, instilled in their students a toxic sense of entitlement, along with a cult of machismo that found expression in bouts of drunken violence.
Two decades later, the terms of this debate have barely changed. Footage of the Kiely’s brawl was eagerly shared as proof that “private school brats” continue to act like entitled barbarians. Undoubtedly the footage is painful to watch. Burly young men stagger around, throwing punches, screaming, or hurling themselves shoulder-first into the crowd.
But if we take a step back, we might notice that there is nothing to distinguish this melee from the sort of thing that happens every Saturday night on Dame Street. Only the frisson of scandal – rich kids behaving badly! – makes this particular fight newsworthy.
It might seem counterintuitive, or even absurd, to propose that the gym-built young men in the Kiely’s video are fragile creatures. But I think it’s true.
Young men, no less than young women, are often frightened, unsure of themselves, and unable to control their negative emotions. No less than young women, young men require a complex matrix of support and opportunity to help them grow in healthy ways.
We need to cultivate a society in which anger and other negative emotions are expressed in healthy ways
But our young men are coming of age in a culture that is terrified of negative emotions – a culture that has no idea what to do with anger, or depression, or resentment, or fear.
Instead of teaching our young men how to handle these powerful feelings, the best we can do is imbue them with the archaic slogans of a brittle machismo – be sportsmanlike! Be strong! Be a gentleman! And this is true of all our young men – not just those who go to rugby schools.
What do you do with your fear, if you’re a man? What do you do with your anger? There is no safe place to put it. There are only unsafe places: perhaps a fight outside Kiely’s after a Senior Cup match; perhaps somewhere worse.
Vulnerability
What the Kiely’s footage shows is not entitlement or thuggish aggression, but vulnerability – the vulnerability of young men who have never been taught how to cope with negative emotions. Brawls between pupils of fee-paying schools, in other words, say less about those schools than they do about the ways in which our society is failing its young men.
The ethos of “sportsmanlike conduct” put forward by rugby schools is just a local instance of a wider phenomenon: our refusal to acknowledge the destructive power of negative emotions.
It isn’t so much that we need to feel compassion for these young men – though I think we do (to feel unobstructed compassion is the beginning of maturity, after all). It’s that we need to teach them to feel compassion for themselves.
And we need to cultivate a society in which anger and other negative emotions are acknowledged and expressed in healthy ways. Understood properly, anger is a guide to how we should act. Suppressed and ignored, anger becomes a poison.
Eighteen years after the Anabel’s case, we have scarcely begun to learn the real lessons taught by Brian Murphy’s tragic death. Isn’t it time we tried?
Kevin Power is the author of the 2008 book Bad Day in Blackrock, a novel loosely based on the death of Brian Murphy