Lamenting the age of acid rain

Cavanman's Diary

In school, acid rain was one of the things we were warned about, so much so that it became a running joke. I recall a classmate getting his hair dyed and, when the teacher gently mocked him over it, he jokingly denied having bleached it.

“Acid rain, sir,” he insisted.

Acid rain - wouldn’t it be a good name for a punk band? - was one of those things we were supposed to be afraid of back then. We were taught it was an existential threat on a global scale and it was regularly referenced in the media throughout the 1990s before abruptly going out of fashion.

In the last quarter of a century, there have been fewer than half a dozen mentions of it in the archives of this newspaper - and two of those were clues in a crossword. Should we still be afraid of it? Honestly, I don’t know. Maybe. Something else has probably replaced it by now as the Big Bad Thing.

My school days in St Patrick’s College ended in 2002; I started in 1996, at the height of that decade, nostalgia for which is growing by the day. People will say it’s because of the music, or the films, or because it was a golden age for sport and pop culture. And, yes, all of that is true but I think there’s another reason. Back then, we actually lived in the present.

We exist now, of course, but I’m not sure we really live – and I’m speaking for myself here, too. We spend much of our time somewhere else, staring into a phone.

And at the risk of falling down the Big Bad Thing rabbit hole, the reason is social media, which has been popular for 20-odd years now and the consequences of which we are only beginning to understand.

That may sound melodramatic but I think, overall, it is one of the most damaging technological advancements in my lifetime. At its most basic level, most people would accept that it has altered the way we think. The effect of this? For one thing, concentration spans have shrunk and, if you can’t concentrate, learning becomes difficult. If you can’t learn, you’re in trouble.

And then there are the knock-on effects. There have been countless examples in recent years where some cause célèbre grows legs online and suddenly occupies a place in public discourse that is wildly disproportionate to its importance in everyday life.

Take Gaza. Scroll through social media and you’d imagine it was the only issue anyone cared about. Yet opinion polls consistently show it ranking well below housing, healthcare, the cost of living and immigration when people are asked about their priorities.

That’s not a comment on Gaza itself, merely an observation on how social media amplifies certain topics and convinces us that the online world and the real world are one and the same.

They aren’t – and while debate is healthy, much online discussion is reductive and can be boiled down to this: I hold a certain position and my only goal in engaging with you is to further it. Everything else is window-dressing.

I’m not into TikTok – at 42, I’m too old – but platforms like Twitter (now X) seem to have rewired the circuitry of our brains. Doom-scrolling has become a national pastime. I would estimate I spend at least an hour a day mindlessly flicking through videos, wading through arguments and outrage; I could be fluent in another language by now, or learned 100 other useful skills with those precious hours.

People once had hobbies, so wholesome as to seem almost twee in 2026 - breeding pigeons, collecting stamps, making things, growing things, playing cards, fixing engines. What do we do now? We scroll, refresh, like, share.

It struck me in recent years while watching football in particular. In years gone by, sport was something you watched and then discussed. Now it seems to be consumed through the prism of this online world in which people often act entirely differently.

When there’s a terrible accident, one of the first things the authorities have to do is plead with people not to share footage of it. Think about that: Ordinary people have to be reminded not to distribute videos depicting another person’s death or maiming. What have we become? Or were we always like that and now just have the means to act on it?

Yet official bodies, the ones who issue this advice, are at it too. The Gardaí, for example, have embraced social media with gusto, posting lame attempts at humour complete with emojis about drivers failing breathalysers on the roadside. I know it’s all designed to engage a younger audience but must everything be reduced to banter and memes?

Social media is, in fact, so fake that entire corporations have invented online personas through which they engage in inane frivolities with members of the public and their corporate peers. Witness Dublin Airport’s official account on Twitter/X, slagging passengers like tone-deaf teenagers. How is this appropriate?

Perhaps the greatest indictment of all, however, is the mild panic many of us experience when the phone signal disappears. For a few moments, it can be extremely annoying and even anxiety-inducing.

It brings to mind Shane Connaughton’s story about meeting Victor Sherlock on the street after Cavan lost a National League match against Offaly in Kingscourt. “What happened?” wondered Shane, then a small boy.

“Nothing happened, son,” said the great Victor, wryly.

And that’s the answer, isn’t it? What would happen if social media vanished from our phones for a while? Nothing, son. After the first pangs of withdrawal wore off, nothing at all.

Last December, this newspaper reported on a motion brought before Cavan County Council by Cllr Áine Smith calling for restrictions on children’s access to social media.

“Any adult who has spent any amount of time at all on social media will be aware of its grim toxicity,” she said.

Cllr Smith pointed out that, while social media can help children connect with friends, there are also risks involved.

“Studies show that too much screen time and social media use can harm children’s brain development,” she said, adding that constant device use makes it harder to learn important life skills. She was and is right. This is a very, very serious issue – yet it has become normalised for kids to have access to social media and to messaging apps. Then again, they’re only aping what so many of us adults are doing. Maybe that’s why so many people romanticise the 1990s. Not because everything was better - it wasn’t. We had our own worries then – in the last year of that decade, mine was the Junior Cert and getting a lift to the next Cavan match - and our own Big Bad Things but our lives were lived on our own terms.

Some fools had platforms but not all of them. Companies sold things rather than lecturing customers and arguments ended when the pub closed or the terrace emptied. Looking back, and maybe this is nostalgia overload, common decency seemed more common.

Whatever has been gained by social media and the ubiquitous access to information has come at a huge cost. Perhaps that’s why so many people look back fondly on the age of acid rain.