I crossed the bridge and climbed the steep, curving hill from the river to the northside. On my right, I passed the Maldron Hotel. Rumoured to be haunted, for two hundred and fifty years until the late 1980s, it had been the North Infirmary, used to treat fever patients during the famine in the 1840s. And, whatever layers came later, that grim history would remain, under the thin skin of the renovation. But the hotel, just below Shandon, had good rates and was always busy. The ghosts only added to its attractions, it seemed.

I walked to the top of the hill. The workshop was in the Firkin Crane, a circular building constructed and used as a weigh-room and butter market in the time of sailing ships. Now it was a choreography and dance centre, though its rehearsal rooms and performance spaces were also hired out to festivals and for special events. I was first to arrive, apart from the Film Festival staff on door duty checking the attendance list. In the ten minutes since, a succession of young people had slunk into the workshop room and scuttled out again immediately on seeing me.

‘Is it something I said?’ I murmured to myself, and went out again to the front of the building. The sun had come out for the first time in weeks and everyone knew it wasn’t going to be hanging around long. Apart from the teachers in huddled discussion near the shaded north-facing entrance, the workshop attendees were across the road, every south-facing step, sill and leaning space occupied. I counted ten school uniforms, five boys and five girls, and ten university-age students, four female and six male. I went up to the teachers, introduced myself as a board representative, and asked if they could get everyone to come inside. That way, I reckoned, I’d have a better chance of monitoring the situation.

I sat with the teachers in a row down the back of the room and the young people sat in a circle of chairs. The room divided along school and college lines and there was no interaction between the two student groups. It hadn’t been a great idea to mix them.