O’Connell Street, Dublin, 7.30am

During my three years in school in Dublin, I got a bus in that could only be described as……a mobile zoo. It was a private bus, £7 a week return per boy and although there were 52 seats, there always seemed to be an extra 20 or 30 on board due to the, shall we say, liberal attitude towards safety on the bus. Basically, it was more often than not three to a seat and the driver was fanatical about ensuring EVERYONE sat down. At the time it seemed like a safety issue but with hindsight it was probably more to do with how obviously overcrowded the bus would look if some of us stood. Keeping up appearances.

Now this bus was, as I said, chaotic. No rule of law applied; at least in school there was a slight chance of a teacher seeing you getting forty shades of shit beaten out of you and maybe for once not pretending not to see it. But on the bus, as long as everyone sat down the driver didn’t care what went on. Of course, down the back everyone stood, but then that was to be expected. And occasionally, someone would get dragged down the back and get smacked around a bit. It happened to most of us; I’m not about to go all Frank McCourt on you now, because it wasn’t that bad. But still….

Anyway, one guy in particular got a very hard time. And his name was Chicken George. Actually it was Gerald but you could say “Gerald” with a straight face. And before you ask, I have no idea where he got the name “Chicken George” came from but it may have had something to do with his rural background. His stop was well outside the town, and once he got on the whole bus shouted “CHICKEN GEORGE!!!”. Sometimes it sounded the same as when the people in Cheers shout “NORM!” but it wasn’t affectionate. Definitely not affectionate.

Chicken George was a tall guy. But he was spotty. So was I, incidentally, and I didn’t get off lightly. But George’s spots were mounds; big painful lumps and his skin was pockmarked and he was awkward-looking and probably a bit bookish and much as I hate to admit it, I thought he was an eejit. It’s weird how the bullied can so quickly become the bully, but that’s human nature (sometimes) and while I don’t think I ever deliberately took part in any bullying of Chicken George (and many my age did, despite him being three years older than us), my silence made me complicit.

I still don’t know what to think of him, I never really knew him as anything other than that geek who got on outside the town. He seemed a bit full of himself (when he wasn’t being bullied and taunted) but maybe that was an act. For the most part, he was the funny-looking George who “fucks chickens”. I still smile when I think of the chorus of “CHICKEN GEORGE!!!” that swept up the bus when he got on. Maybe he’s not bitter; I’m not and I was smacked around a lot more than he was. But you sometimes wonder what someone like him is doing now.

Well now you too can find out. Because each morning on O’Connell Street, Dublin at around 7.30am, Chicken George rolls out some mats on the central pathway outside the GPO, sticks on some meditation tape and joins in with a few friends in a spot of, well, meditation. Sometimes there’s two of them, sometimes nearly ten. But it’s quite a surreal sight to behold at such an hour on Ireland’s “main street”. You see, Chicken George practices Falun Gong.

It sounds good, the same amount of syllables are present in both “Chicken George” and “Falun Gong”. Yes, believe it or not, that very same funny-looking geek does that practice of “meditation and exercises with teachings based on the universal principle of “Truthfulness-Compassion-Tolerance”” that the Chinese government is so afraid of that they arrest any known practioner and send them to labour camps for a few years. Which is very nearly what happened to our George last year when the hen-lover only went and demonstrated the Falun Gong posture in the middle of Beijing, which led to his arrest, violent questioning and subsequent deportation back to Ireland. He continues to fight for justice and freedom for practioners in China, who have been made out by the government to be anything from traitors to animals.

So, in short, I never thouhgt I’d say this but I kind of admire Chicken George now. I mean, what have I done with my life so far? Very little; in fact dare I say I’m only getting started. But there’s a contemporary of mine, a bullied geek on a maniac schoolbus eight years ago, who’s made a difference. I certainly hadn’t known that much about Falun Gong before all that. And now I do. I’m not sure I want to join up, but at least I pricked up my ears. And that must count for something.

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