Celebrations in Bishop Lucey’s joint

BUSES roll into the city centre full of drunken students — Junior Cert night has truly arrived.

Doused in perfume and aftershave, the Junior Cert class of 2007 certainly made the effort for the night out, some dressed and coloured for a beach in St Tropez rather than a chilly autumn evening.

As early as 5pm yesterday evening, groups of students who had received their results hours earlier, swayed along the streets of Cork city, unable to stand upright, substituting lampposts for crutches.

The pierced and tattooed fraternity nodded sombrely to the strains of heavy metal in Bishop Lucey Park in the centre of Cork city with one teen seen rolling his first joint.

Other visitors to the park laugh and scream as they bump into students from neighbouring schools and examine each other’s slips of paper with those all important results before topping up soft drink bottles with various different spirits concealed in school bags.

As the evening grows older and students hover towards “alcohol free events” organised all around the city, one young man was seen holding his girlfriend’s hair as she vomited down an alleyway.

Another group of girls arrived in style pulling up outside a disco in a powder-pink stretch limo.

Although most students were drunk on arrival, inside, students who managed to sneak alcohol past security, swig from bottles in the toilets.

Frisky couples made full use of the club’s couches and took advantage of the poor lighting in to engage in extra-curricular activities best left to the bedroom while security turned a blind eye.

One parent dropping her son off to the event said that she blames a combination of factors for the behaviour.

“In this day and age kids are growing up so much quicker than before, television and how it portrays the experience of alcohol is definitely a factor — it makes it look glamorous

“At the end of the day, as a parent you have to take responsibility for how you bring your child up and what they do, there’s no point in blaming them for getting drunk if you allow them to.

“There are clearly some parents who don’t care if the scenes on the streets of Cork tonight are anything to go by. Forget binge drinking, try crazed drinking,” she said.