Celebrities pen some timely advice... to themselves

IF, as George Bernard Shaw put, youth is wasted on the young, the pity of it is that it takes so long to find that out.

So what if you could go back to your teenage years or invent a time machine and observe what you were like as a teenager — say a gawky, unsure, awkward 16-year-old on the cusp of adulthood?

That, in a way, was the task set a number of well-known Irish figures when they were asked to write a letter to their younger selves. The result is a book, With Love from Me... to Me, published this week in aid of the Irish Youth Foundation, an organisation that assists disadvantaged youth.