Young Skins

Comparative · 2027 & 2028 Leaving Cert

Colin Barrett’s Young Skins is a collection of stories set in one invented Mayo town, and it is about young men who have nowhere to go and no vocabulary for saying so.

Barrett published the collection in 2013 and it won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and the Rooney Prize. The setting is Glanbeigh, a fictional town in the west of Ireland with a bypass, a shopping centre, a river and a lot of pubs. Every story stays inside it, which is part of the argument: the town is not a place people leave, it is a place people circle.

It is on the comparative list for 2027 and 2028, and it is usually taken for Cultural Context. Studying a collection rather than a single narrative changes your job slightly, and the section below explains how to handle that in an answer.

Young Skins: What You Are Actually Studying

There are seven pieces, six short stories and one novella. They do not share a plot and only occasionally share characters. What they share is a town, a social class, an age group and a set of pressures, and that is what a comparative question is asking about anyway.

Do not try to summarise all seven. Choose three you know well and use them as your evidence for the whole collection. Most classes work from The Clancy Kid, the novella Calm With Horses, and one or two of the shorter pieces, and that is a perfectly defensible spread.

Glanbeigh Itself

The town is described with real precision and almost no affection. Barrett’s Glanbeigh has a river, a bypass that took the through-traffic away, estates, a shopping centre car park and pubs that function as the main social institution. Work is casual, seasonal or absent. Older men drink. Younger men drink and fight.

Note how little the outside world features. Dublin exists, England exists, but they belong to other people. When a character in these stories imagines leaving, the imagining is the event, and nothing follows it. For Cultural Context that is your central point about place: this is a text in which geography functions as a ceiling.

Calm With Horses

The novella is the heaviest piece in the book and the one most answers are built on. Douglas Armstrong, known as Arm, is a former boxer who now provides violence for the Devers family, a local drug-dealing clan. He works to instructions from Dympna Devers, who is roughly his age and treats him as an asset and, in his own understanding, a friend.

Arm also has a son, Jack, who is autistic, and an ex-partner, Ursula, who is trying to get the boy the support he needs. The novella keeps cutting between the two halves of his life, and Arm cannot bring them into contact. He is gentle and completely lost with his son, and he is competent and unhesitating when he is sent to hurt someone.

That split is the collection’s most examinable idea. Barrett does not present Arm as a brute with a soft side. He presents a man whose only marketable skill is harm, in a place with nothing else on offer, who cannot see any way to be a father except by earning money from the Devers.

The Clancy Kid and the Shorter Stories

The Clancy Kid opens the book with a young narrator working a pub job and drifting through a Sunday with his friend Tug, a large, volatile man who is one wrong word away from a fight at all times. In the background is a missing child, referred to by everyone and resolved by nobody, and the day ends at the river with a group of children who tell the two men, in effect, that they are trespassing on somebody else’s youth.

The shorter stories work by the same method: a small event, an ordinary evening, a fight that starts over nothing, a girl who is written about but rarely given her own voice, and an ending that stops rather than concludes. Barrett is not interested in resolution, and that is worth naming in an answer about how the collection is written.

Masculinity as a Trap

Every male character in Young Skins is performing something. Toughness, indifference, being good craic, having a plan. The performance is exhausting and none of them can drop it, because the alternative in Glanbeigh is being seen as soft, and being seen as soft has physical consequences.

Barrett’s real subject is the tenderness these men cannot express. It surfaces in odd places: care for an animal, care for a younger sibling, an unexpected kindness to a stranger, and then it is immediately covered over with a joke or a drink. Answers that notice this score better than answers that just count the fights.

Language and Voice

The prose is the reason this book won prizes, and it is worth a paragraph. Barrett writes in a heightened, exact style that sits on top of very plain speech, so a character will say four blunt words and then the narration will describe a car park or a river in language a poem would be proud of.

That gap is deliberate. It gives these young men a scale and a seriousness they cannot claim for themselves. Because the collection is contemporary and in copyright, quote sparingly from your own copy, name the story, and spend your marks on what the style is doing rather than on transcribing it.

Where the Women Are

This is a book about young men, and you should say so rather than work around it. Women appear as mothers, as girlfriends, as barmaids, as the subject of a conversation happening two feet away from them, and the point of view is almost never theirs. Ursula in Calm With Horses is the clearest case: she is the one adult in the novella making sensible decisions about a child, and the story stays with the man who cannot follow her reasoning.

You can read that as a limitation of the book or as its subject, and a good answer will say which and why. Barrett is writing about a culture in which young men do not talk to women so much as talk about them, and the narration reproduces that on purpose. If a question asks about the presentation of women, or about relationships, this is the honest ground to stand on.

Using This in the Exam

How to use it: Pick three pieces and stay with them. For Cultural Context, use Glanbeigh’s geography and economy, the position of women in the stories, and the way violence is organised in Calm With Horses. Name the story every time you refer to a moment, since an examiner cannot follow a point that could belong to any of the seven. Then cross to your other texts on the same idea: a place that decides in advance what its young people are allowed to become.

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