The year Simon Harris was born, I was in a mental hospital

Newly elected Taoiseach Simon Harris, gestures as he leaves the Dail, in Dublin, following the vote by Irish parliamentarians to elect him, making him the youngest Taoiseach in the Republic of Ireland's history. Picture date: Tuesday April 9, 2024.

There’s a T-shirt online that says ‘It’s Weird Being The Same Age As Old People’, with which I must agree. It’s weird AF.

Simon Harris would have been seven when Kurt Cobain died; he’d have just turned three when an unknown Nirvana played to a few hundred Sub Pop fans in a student union bar in London, a fiver to get in and cut-price pints.

It was 1989, a year before Dave Grohl joined them, two years before Nevermind, and Kurt left off a fire extinguisher on stage to liven things up.

I learned that night how stage diving is a bad idea if you wear glasses.

I realise telling my kids about this early Nirvana gig is the same as my partner’s 80-something parents recounting how they had seen the Kinks, the Beatles, Ziggy Stardust, back in the mists of time.

Like, cool, but distant and unrelatable, on account of everyone being so old or dead. And offline. Was there even electricity back then?

The year Simon Harris was born, 1986, I was in a mental hospital because being young in Old Ireland had quite literally driven me around the bend.

I’d become conscious of just how much Old Ireland hated girls and women, and wasn’t sure what to do about it, other than temporarily lose the plot before buying a ticket out. I’d have left when Simon was one.

Simon won’t remember Old Ireland.

He would have been seven when they decriminalised gayness, 10 when they closed the last Magdalen laundry, and 11 when they allowed miserable couples to legally split; he would have grown up in a very different, rapidly changing Ireland, an Ireland that was psychologically decolonising at warp speed.

Not a perfect Ireland, but no longer a place where they put girls in laundry jail for having sex, and where boys were routinely monstered by clerics.

So, providing Simon is not hamstrung by inter-generational trauma, putting a 30-something in charge seems fresh and forward-thinking.

Poll after poll now places Ireland as one of the best countries in the world to live; unlike the next-door neighbours, it’s up and coming.

It brims with cultural confidence.

Obviously, there is a whole new basement of monsters to deal with: the greed and insanity of the housing market; the rise of the far right; and the biggest monster of them all, climate collapse.

And I’ll be honest here: I know very little about Simon Harris apart from his date of birth and the fact that he’s now Taoiseach.

What I do know, as does anyone vaguely sentient, is that leaving old fellas in charge as the world bombs and blazes is a terrible idea.

They’re either power-crazed psychopaths (Trump, Putin, Netanyahu) or doddery ineffectuals (Biden) who further undermine our burning, warring world. Hope is with the younger ones. 

There are 30-somethings leading Chile, Finland, Montenegro, and now Ireland. The oldies, and I include Gen X, have trashed the place; time for make way for fresh energy.

Ideally, it would be Greta and Malala, but we take what we get.