Young Skins

Comparative · 2027 & 2028 Leaving Cert

Colin Barrett’s Young Skins is a collection of short stories set in the fictional town of Glanbeigh, in the rural west of Ireland after the Celtic Tiger collapse. It is a tough, modern comparative text, and it rewards students who can talk precisely about place and the young men who are stuck in it.

Do not think of Young Skins as one continuous story. It is six stories, and they share a world rather than a plot. The same small town, the same kind of pubs, car parks and bad weather, the same generation of young men with nothing much to do. Stories like “The Clancy Kid”, “Bait” and “Diamonds” each follow a different narrator over a short stretch of time, often a single night or day, while the long centrepiece “Calm with Horses” reads almost like a short novel in its own right. When you write about the text, you choose your evidence across the stories: that is the skill the comparative is testing.

The people you will keep coming back to are the young men of Glanbeigh and the older ones they are turning into. “Calm with Horses” gives you Arm, a former boxer who now works as muscle for the Devers, a local drug-dealing family, and the threat of violence runs underneath almost every scene. Elsewhere you meet narrators drinking to forget, men circling old rivalries over a girl, and characters carrying visible damage from fights and accidents. Across all six stories the women, the absent fathers and the wider community sit at the edges, while the camera stays fixed on masculinity, boredom and the pull to either escape Glanbeigh or sink into it. Knowing why these characters behave as they do matters far more than memorising what happens.

Study Young Skins

This text suits the Cultural Context mode especially well, because the town itself shapes everything the characters can and cannot do. Start with the angle below, then build your own comparisons with your other two texts.