Why can't we as Irish people behave ourselves? Or can we?

Beefy78

Senor Fancy Pants wrote: »

The gimmick that was Arthurs Day led to Dublin being packed full of street drinkers. I didnt see much hassle that I can recall. Much like most St.Paddy's Day's

Didn't Arthur's Day get canned because of the amount of trouble & hassle that it was causing?

FWIW as a non-Irish person I adore the atmosphere and scenes around Dublin on St.Patricks' Day. It's one of my favourite days of the year.

EDIT - seems I may have mis-remembered the issues with Arthur's Day.

pilly

I think the St. Patricks Day Festival takes a terrible kicking. There are amazing events arranged all around Dublin City, a lot of them family orientated. Most of the messy drinking occurs after dark in temple bar. If you're looking for family fun you wouldn't be around there at that time.

seachto7

Beefy78 wrote: »

Didn't Arthur's Day get canned because of the amount of trouble & hassle that it was causing?

FWIW as a non-Irish person I adore the atmosphere and scenes around Dublin on St.Patricks' Day. It's one of my favourite days of the year.

EDIT - seems I may have mis-remembered the issues with Arthur's Day.

WHat happened again?

J.pilkington

pilly wrote: »

I think the St. Patricks Day Festival takes a terrible kicking. There are amazing events arranged all around Dublin City, .

Exactly posts like we have seen from the OP seriously misrepresent st Patrick's day and is a huge insult to all the good work that volunteers put in. It's a great family day out

Maybe the op needs to stay out of the boozer / trouble spots

kunst nugget

seachto7 wrote: »

WHat happened again?

General drunkenness abounded - I think the problems kind of stem from people leaving work and starting drinking straight away for the 17.59 'To Martha' toast and getting scuttered because they had no food in them.

Tuesday_Girl

I attended many Queen and King's days in Amsterdam, it's a huge party with hundreds of thousands people taking part, 200,000 of those coming in to the city by train for the day. It's not allowed to sell or consume alcohol on the trains and you can't carry more than one alcoholic drink at a time on the streets, nor buy more than one drink per person at a time. Thousands of boats take to the canals and the water police have a large presence checking safety of boats and doing random breathalyser tests.

The event is extremely well-organised and policed and while it gets a bit messy as the evening closes in it's nothing like the scale of drunkenness you would see on St. Patrick's Day, during Race Week, at a concert or even on a bank holiday weekend in Ireland.

Binge drinking is nowhere as widespread in European countries as it here, people of all ages mainly stick to beers when drinking, the police are never far away and are ready to hand out fines for drunkenness or any other public order offences. Makes for a friendly and safe day out for all ages.

seachto7

kunst nugget wrote: »

General drunkenness abounded - I think the problems kind of stem from people leaving work and starting drinking straight away for the 17.59 'To Martha' toast and getting scuttered because they had no food in them.

Welcome to the advertising industry in Dublin, where this happens every week.

PARlance

Croke Park and it's surrounding areas on any of the many big match days throughout the year is a fairy good example of everyone getting along. Plenty of drink on board too, for many in attendance.

83,000 in one stadium and you don't even have to segregate fans.

Mrs OBumble

kunst nugget wrote: »

An off licence not opening until 5 is doing that off their own back. Paddy's Day is a bank holiday so normal Sunday times would apply to it.

Dunno about dublin.

But in Galway the guards "encourage" pubs and offies not to open until the parade is over, and the organisers put the parade start time earlier (11:30am) to facilitate this.

Such encouragement may not be 100% envisaged by the licensing laws but it has had a noticable positive effective on the state of the streets later in the day.

For Forks Sake

Only one man can save us all

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjCdB5p2v0Y

irishman86

A society who base everything about how messy drunk they can get. Ya no thank you to that street party.

dusty207

Dr Crayfish wrote: »

Most European parties involve drinking, yes.

In moderation.

Agricola

It's a combination of a few things. We are a young nation. We're only affluent a wet week. Our parent's and certainly grandparent's generation hadn't an arse in their trousers compared to nowadays. So that brings with it a certain level of hedonism as unlike countries who are "old money" we're new to all this largese. Since we got out from under the oppressive Catholic regime we're only opening up socially relatively recently and coming into line with the rest of the western world, decades later.

Then you have the long long association with alcohol. Even when no one had the price of a bottle of milk, pubs were crowded all over the country. Villages with a shop and a church often had 2 or 3 pubs. Drinking is in our DNA. We associate drink completely with celebrations of every description. In fact, shure it's not really a celebration until everyone is drunk.

You also have the obsequious Irish desire to be patted on the back at all opportunities. Since we associate consuming stupifying amounts of alcohol with "being a great man for the pints" we do all in our power to appear to others to be "a great man for the pints" because we receive legendary status amongst our peers.

Finally we have a culture of fecklessness and disregard for rules or authority.