Observe the photograph above.
It was taken on a bright early summer's day in May 1992, almost 20 years ago.
The 103 young men pictured here were pupils of Naas CBS and were weeks away from sitting their leaving certs and heading on to wherever the world was going to take them.
They were all between 17 and 18 years old, which means that they are now somewhere between 36 and 38. Next June will be the 20th anniversary of their departure from the school.
Back then they were all school boys, obsessed with football, music, school discos in Stirrups, the Ambassador, Nijinky's, leather jackets, the Batman movies (the first two), the Cure, An Emotional Fish, Nirvana, (very) early Blur, Doc Martin's and girls from the convent.
None of them had mobile phones, although the father of one, who worked in the bank, had one, and it resembled a size-11 shoe with a six inch aerial (15.24 centimetres for the young people).
Needless to say, that phone did not send text messages, take photographs, upload said photographs to the internet, browse the internet, book flights, play games, play music or use satelites to direct you to your holiday home in Spain (in the unlikely event that you had one of those).
A handful of the 103 had access to computers which were just about able to handle word processing (a forerunner of Microsoft Word for you young people) and Pacman. It's hard to comprehend this now, but there was no internet, no Facebook, Bebo, Twitter or email.
It wasn't uncommon to see a queue for a pay phone.
Digital photography did not exist. Photographs, including this one, were taken on film that had to be processed.
None of the lads had a car, although one had a small Honda motorbike which was pored over and endlessly discussed as if it was a space ship.
We didn't have Oxegen, Electric Picnic or the Festival of World Culture. We didn't have multiplex cinemas, the IFC, McDonalds on every street corner, breakfast rolls, Lucozade Sport, hybrid cars, X-Factor or a thousand channels in our televisions.
We had RTE 1 and 2, BBC 1 and 2, UTV and Channel 4, Ford Escorts and Toyota Corolas. We had Malone's Bakery and Feile, and until we lost them, we never realised how much we loved them.
Twenty years later, the class of 1992 are doctors, lawyers, a journalist (yours truly), an equestrian centre manager, a mechanic, business men, computer engineers, quantity surveyors, accountants, a writer on Fair City, a surfer, an artist, a lecturer in literature, a poet, a plumber and every other thing you could possibly imagine, and surely some you probably can't.
For many, their full heads of dark hair (long was in at the time) are a mere memory, while not-so-full waist-lines are a similar ancient memory.
Many have left the county, and many have even left the country.
At least one of them, tragically, has passed away.
Many of them are the fathers of young families, and consequently they're often to be seen wandering alone late in night, tired and dazed, like ghostly figures, along the dimly-lit aisles of enormous supermarkets, looking for baby wipes.
Some of them may even have sons who will go to Naas CBS, where they will obsess over football, music and girls from the convent and it's nice to know that in that sense, some things never change.
Those 20 years have been more transformative than anyone alive at the time could have imagined. To the class of 1992, the Kildare of late 2011 would have been just about barely recognisable.
Back then, we didn't necessarily know it, but we lived in a country that fell far short of the standard of living experienced by the rest of western Europeans.
There were essentially no Polish people living in Ireland, or from anywhere else in eastern Europe, which had, until three years previously, still languished behind the Iron Curtain.
Ah yes, the Iron Curtain. It wasn't mentioned in our history books because it wasn't yet history. Your average 17 year old may not fully understand the concept of this now, but there were no weekends away in Prague, Berlin, Krakow or Budapest. You simply could not go there, even if you wanted to.
Ryanair was there, but it wasn't the low-fares monster it is today and consequently only the wealthiest took weekends away.
A flashy car was something of a rarity and hitching, which was still a viable and reasonably reliable form of transport, was the best way for most people to see the inside of a flashy car.
When we were growing up, a number of things were clear. After school, we would either be one of the lucky few who found a job in Ireland, or emigrate. Going to college wasn't really a third option. It was an interesting and fun way of delaying the inevitable and making us more employable in another country.
In a short space of time, by the time any of us who had gone to college had graduated, everything had changed.
The Celtic Tiger was starting to purr and with each passing month, opportunity knocked louder and louder.
Technological advances have changed our world dramtically. Recently I was texting a friend who was relaying to me, in real time, how she was getting on during a hike at Yosemite National Park - which is in a rural part of northern California.
She also sent me pictures and a short video of her group making dinner over a camp fire, 5,000 (8,000kms) miles and nine time zones away.
Using Skype on her Iphone, I could have chatted to them all as we ate dinner together, except that my laptop was on the blink.
In 1992, I might have gotten a battered postcard, three weeks after she arrived home – and would have pored over it endlessly. The world was still an enormous, exotic and mysterious place – an exciting proposition.
Now we can acccess so much of it at our fingertips that, as Kavanagh said: 'Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder'.
Technology has opened up Kildare to the rest of the world and the rest of the world to Kildare. The class of 1992 can now do business in another county or country, without actually moving there.
With a population of 200,000 there are now twice as many people living in Kildare as there were in 1992.
Naas in the early 1990's, for a bunch of spotty lovelorn teenagers was a place that was on the edge of somewhere (Dublin) and miles from anywhere else.
Now it's is a comfortable, cosmopolitan and lively place to live, whereas in 1992, it was the sticks.
To reflect the changes in Kildare and Ireland over the past 20 years, the Leinster Leader wants to try a small social experiment.
Between now and the New Year, we're calling on the men in this photograph to make contact with us, and give a brief outline of what they've been up to during the last two decades.
It's likely that there were some in the class who are not in the photograph, and we would of course be happy to hear from there as well.
Email conor@leinsterleader.ie
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