Displaced in Mullingar:Youthful exuberance knows no borders. But instead of weapons they have mobile phones, writes Michael Harding.

Once upon a time there was a girl from Poland who came to Mullingar, and she met a boy from Brazil, who said that if she ate enough figs she wouldn't get pregnant, so it would be okay to make love that night.

This suited the girl because she was a good Catholic and didn't want to use contraceptives. And so, all night long, they made love in Mullingar, and the next morning her boyfriend told her to go immediately to the doctor and get the morning-after pill.

But she wouldn't go. So he went instead. And the doctor said, "No, no, I cannot give you the pill. It is the woman must come for the tablet."

But still she said no. So that afternoon, the boy got his sister, who also lived in Mullingar, to go to the doctor and pretend she needed the pill.

When she got it, she gave it to her brother, who gave it to the girl from Poland, who took the pill, and didn't get pregnant, and they were all able to live happy ever after for another few weeks.

But not all love stories end happily.

There was a young couple ahead of me in the O2 shop, trying to disentangle the last little threads of their shared life. Apparently they had a single account, in her name, though they both had separate phones. So they wanted to close his number down. She would retain her phone, and he'd start a new account.

It emerged that he had recently acquired an upgrade on his phone, which meant his number couldn't be closed until March of next year. But she no longer wanted to pay, or even receive his bills. So they were hoping that the lady in the shop would sort them out. And she did.

She reassured them that they could indeed switch the upgrade into her name, drop his number from the account, and let him go free.

Of all the things he might acquire in his future life, such as a new house or a new wife, or even new children, nothing could have brought him as much joy and happiness as the thought of a new phone.

Humans need mobile phones like babies need dummies. Eventually everyone ends up in a phone shop, gloating over new pink Nokias, or some other glittering gadget. I suppose we just like the sound of other human voices.

As a child I used to spend hours spinning the dial of an old wireless, listening to strange voices. And there was a man in Donegal, long ago, who used to listen to spaceships floating over Errigal on his Ham radio.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, two cosmonauts were stranded in space. Each day, as their space capsule crossed the northern hemisphere, they would wait for a signal from the man in Donegal, and the man in Donegal would listen to the static on his radio receiver, hoping for a voice from beyond the clouds.

Even in adult life I still sit at the radio for hours, listening to politicians, football managers, cooks, taxi drivers, and women with heart conditions, talking to Joe Duffy or anyone else that will listen.

In Mullingar I can listen to so many voices from central and eastern Europe that sometimes the supermarket queue feels like the wireless of my childhood.

Mullingar is a ghetto in cyberspace; a virtual suburb, in a Europe that is being mapped out, not with military borders, but with the hum of love, on mobile phones.

The boys and girls from beyond the Rhine who are mating by the banks of the Royal Canal probably don't care much for the past. They didn't build Auschwitz. And they are too young to worry about secret police.

I doubt if they know what a street looks like when it is full of blood, or what a bombed room resembles, in the foggy minutes of silence, before the injured awake.

I once heard a man describe his wife's body after an explosion. "She was like a ragged doll," he said. "The clothes were blown clean off her. And her feet were gone." But that was a long time ago. And while history demands its acts of remembrance, youth must also be allowed their moments of dizzy forgetting.

There were places in Ireland where mobile phones were once a nuisance, because they threatened the accuracy of remote-controlled bombs. Not any more. On hot summer nights in Mullingar, there is only love on the line.