Like, it seems, everybody else, I’ve been watching Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham’s brilliant and terrible Netflix series Adolescence. It does what only great drama can do, which is to make a big thing in the outside world feel intimate and personal. In this case, the big thing is boyhood, a condition hauntingly embodied in Owen Cooper’s searing performance as a 13-year-old accused of murdering a girl he knows from school.

Adolescence is set, of course, in England, but it has a particular resonance in Ireland. It brings to mind the terrible death of Ana Kriegel in Lucan in 2018. Her killers, Boy A and Boy B, were also 13-year-old boys. And like the kid that Cooper plays in the series, those boys came from stable, loving families. They were not freaks of nature but products of a profoundly troubled culture.

Much of the trouble is certainly to do with the way feral capitalism is conducting a vast uncontrolled experiment on children’s brains, flooding them with pornographic images and brutal misogyny. The social media giants have been allowed to frack adolescent minds, extracting vast profits from sedimentary needs and desires while leaving kids and families to deal with the toxic sludge. One of the reasons Donald Trump is going to war with the

© The Irish Times