On my new bike I thought I’d spend the evening taking it for a spin. I went south to the mountains, and took a wrong turn at Terenure ending up towards Tallaght. But I just kept on cycling – I just wanted to get a sense of this city I’ve moved to. Tallaght seems impressively transformed, with a massive redevelopment creating a new city centre, cranes crowding the horizon, and a new park that seemed very well laid out, which in a few years will look as good as Stephen’s Green. I cycled up the hill to see more around me, and then saw, further south, that the mountains were very near, just an estate or two between me and the hills. I had an urge to get up high, to get away from urban and suburban sprawl. I’ve been in the country for ten months and I realise I need to keep in touch with nature.

So I cycled down through the estate. Houses in Tallaght may be bland and overly uniform, but it is undoubtedly leafy suburbia – gardens front and back, five minutes from the new city centre, the new tram making it more accessible, and presumably jobs are easy to come by nowadays, so there’s money coming in. The roads are good, there’s no junk or rubbish lying around, it’s all well-tended. A green space, big enough to play football on, had a path on the side which I cycled through. Old graffiti on the wall was being covered by maturing shrubs. About twenty lads on the pitch were laughing, chatting away, about twenty feet from me. White, late teenagers, not kids. A bottle, aimed with precision, hit me in the back and smashed into the wall beside me. I looked at them, and carried on cycling.

It was so bizarre. I’ve cycled through London for twelve years and never had that happen to me. Through Camberwell and Brixton and Camden and Hackney and Dalston and Stepney and Mile End. Through many many suburban parks, and plenty of dodgy looking council estates, built in the ugly London housing boom of the sixties and seventies, concrete tower blocks that offend the eye. But never so much as a jeer, from anyone.

The bottle was a foot away from hitting me in the face. But I don’t think my heart beat raised for more than a few seconds. When cycling, more damage can be done to you by someone opening their car door in front of you than getting a bump on the chin from a bottom of a coke bottle, you learn how to keep calm.

But it does make me wonder. I’ve decided I’m going to be writing about this city, and what is loosely called “social exclusion”. I’ve started the ball rolling in that regard, and I will be blogging about what I discover along the way. I’m interested in particular in Irish male youth, and what it means to be an Irish man these days. Those lads threw a bottle at a guy they didn’t know cycling through their neighbourhood. There wasn’t even laughter afterwards, they seemed to go silent. Perhaps one of them went too far, and the others were embarrassed by him. There may have been a second bottle, but it didn’t break, so I can’t be sure. I of course didn’t go over to them to find out why they did it, although a part of me would love to have found out more about them. Perhaps when blogging is more widespread I’d be able to name and tag the estate and the park and someone in that gang might pick it up and give his perspective or experience of what life is like there.

The thing is, they were not deprived kids, the suburb I was cycling through was not a deprived area, by any stretch of the imagination. Judging by appearances. Evidently, appearances are deceptive.

Violence is a symptom of things gone wrong. A community where it’s ok for young men to throw bottles at strangers minding their own business is in trouble. I can’t imagine a group of Italian lads doing the same thing, and yet they hang around in groups on street corners just like every where else in the world.

I can already imagine reactions to this along the lines of: I shouldn’t have been there. I ought to know better, cycling through a place like that. A place like what? Is Ireland full of no-go areas? Places where the “underclass” live, and resent intruders? A white Harlem?

Within 20 minutes I was back in town, cycling through the Liberties, the area I will be living in. I found, to my relief, a sleepy warren of streets, no lads hanging around, pubs bustling and bursting at the seams with loud chattering people. It felt safe. But who knows what’s safe any more? I don’t.