I've just googled the present occupant and find to my pleasure that the mayor is a woman, formerly a chef and a mother of five. Welcome as she is, I don't suppose Catherine Byrne got to her present position because of evident mayoral qualities. None of them do. It's all done by deals within and between the parties.

And none of them come around any more with a bag of coal.

But I've always known, more or less vaguely, who runs New York. And I am an admirer of the present mayor, Michael Bloomberg. He's too rich and too sure of himself to bother with being that tedious thing, flamboyant, and in general he seems to be a sensible man who says and does commonsense things.

So it is a surprise to see him getting something completely wrong. But he has.

Recently, he and his commissioner of schools stepped up the level of the security checks done at the entrances to many of the schools in the city.

X-ray machines habitually scan the pupils and their backpacks for guns and knives, which are confiscated. But now they're confiscating cellphones . . . as mobile phones are called in America . . . too. No doubt this is because the phones are the instruments of drug-dealing. But since the administration can't be seen to classify some schools but not others as sites of drug-dealing, all schools are taking away the kids' phones. And the mammies and daddies are up in arms, the more priveleged the more loudly.

How did Bloomberg and his advisers not see that technological breakthroughs change human relations? The mobile phone both offers a means of surveillance . . . the question most commonly asked on it is surely 'Where are you?' . . . and of reassurance. When the terrorists flew into the twin towers on 11 September and insecurity set in forever as a dimension of living in Manhattan, schoolchildren evacuating downtown schools communicated with their parents by cellphone. Doomed people said goodbye by cellphone when the hijacked planes came down low enough. People knew their loved ones were dead when their cellphones rang and rang and there was no reply. Checking-in by phone is an easy intimacy that commits busy children and parents to nothing except words, but the words are an awful lot better than no words.

On the other hand, teachers may prefer, though they dare not say it, to have cellphones taken out of the classroom. Since there is no limit to the narcissism of the American child, I take it that in schools where they can get away with it the kids make calls and take them in class. Even in the expensive private schools, where that isn't allowed, I'm sure they spend a lot of time receiving and sending silent text messages. Not to mention all the other things that can be done with phones and cameraphones and blackberries and so on . . . an article I read in the men's magazine Maxim suggested among other things you can do with a phone is pick up a girl. If you take an unflattering photo of her on your phone, she won't be able to resist asking you to take a better one. So Maxim says.

And you can access Google on your phone, which means you can track down just about any piece of information. No more going to libraries and looking up reference books and taking notes. No more having to memorise anything. Today's teachers grew up and were trained in a different pedagogic universe from the one the students inhabit.

For example, a professor in a good college told me that the other day she signed up to the computer programme that will check her students' essays not only for plagiarism but for having been purchased from one of the websites that now sell essays. You can customise your order, even . . . do me an Easter Rising with two primary sources and a statistical analysis, kind of thing. Sooner or later what was once called a student will be able to get from kindergarten to a doctorate without doing any study at all.

It all makes one wonder whether the one lord mayor of Dublin in recent times anyone took a blind bit of notice of wasn't, in fact, the one most suited to the 21st century.

He was unworthy of the office, of course, and Fianna Fail should be ashamed of ever having preferred him. But there was nothing much wrong with him except that he was full of himself and turned out not to know anything, especially if it was anything to do with the EU.

But who is to say that a plausible airhead like Royston Brady is not what everybody is soon going to be? That he wasn't as suited to modern times as Alfie Byrne was to his?