Displaced in Mullingar:It's a sad circus on the steps of the courthouse, writes Michael Harding

The circuit court regularly sits in Mullingar, providing an in-your-face view of the Tiger's Underbelly. The invisible poor, who don't often show their faces in public. The underclass who move in deep water, like sly fish. The good, the bad, and the beautiful. Nasty little dealers, who survive in shadowed alleyways, loitering in the toilets of nightclubs, or floating through working-class areas in their metallic autos, sleek as a shark's fin. Broken-hearted mothers. Victims of alcohol, tobacco, natural infections, or abusing partners. Children who have taken to the street corner like monks once took to the cloister.

These hoodies, in particular, are the lost brotherhood of modern Ireland. Boys with no maps. Boys with no vocation. Boys whose instincts tell them they are warriors, but whose society tells them to go away because they don't talk right, or can't spell. And it's a sad circus that assembles on the steps of the courthouse every few weeks - a stone building adjacent to the Mullingar Arts Centre. The court provides an alternative theatre to the happy musicals across the road.

I arrived at around 11. There were barristers in black gowns and white collars, solicitors in smart grey suits, and other advisers in expensive overcoats. The main door was thronged with gaunt junkie types, and small stout women smoking like trains. Haggard and dried-out faces. Beetroot cheeks with purple cobwebs. Arms tattooed with love and hate.

I pushed through the door. Hooded faces studied me as if they were trying to remember my features for later encounters. Inside, men stood without shame in their prison clothes, handcuffed to prison officers. The judge was grumpy but meticulous. He scrutinised details as best he could, but delivered justice as if he was working against the clock.

The bewilderment in the eyes of the poor mothers was metaphysical. The lean hoodies had the visceral attention of half-starved whippets. An animal alertness arose in me, which I have only felt on the platforms of late-night train stations in Bombay and Naples. I have nothing against hoodies. Some of my best friends have children. But these were definitely not the huggable type.

Later that evening I went to the cinema.

There were a few young boys, lanky and shy, loitering outside the door. Drifting up and down along the windows of Harvey Normans. Gazing in at digital televisions. Their innocence reminded me of the bicycle shed in St Patrick's College Cavan, during the late 1960s. Country boys on bikes would arrive on a windy day, their bushy hair tossed like haystacks in a hurricane. There they would spend a half-hour before class, licking their fringes into the correct wave of Beatle Cool.

Anyway, the hoodies took up a position on the left lower flank. They were more interested in James Bond's car than anything else. The iconic Aston Martin gathered them all into a collective sigh of admiration.When Bond's car confronted a tied-up woman on the road they were horrified. Not that the woman might die, but that Bond might damage his wheels. James avoided her, but his car spun out of control and was wrecked. One little fellow could not contain himself any longer.

"Feck that," he shouted, "I would have bombed straight into her." They were just giddy, but eventually they drew enough attention to themselves to get thrown out.

As they passed, I got the whiff of designer deodorants. And beneath the hoods, there were still childish blushes on their soft faces. These guys don't have jeeps. Their hoods keep off the rain and wind as they walk home. I know, because I saw them later huddled in the door of an off-licence. And they've probably never seen the inside of a courtroom. Yet.