Templars Hall

I’d like to thank everyone who commented on yesterday’s report on WLR from Templar’s Hall in Waterford.  Of course it was nice to have so much positive feedback, and those who expressed reservations about the piece have given me food for thought in the coming days. I have to admit, the confrontations with drunken revelers were kinda fun (and what you heard was pretty much what happened, I don’t believe in stitching people up in the editing room), but the thought of anyone trying to bring up their family in this environment was profoundly upsetting.  I went to Templar’s Hall on Monday night to see just how bad the anti-social behaviour engaged in by some of the students in rented houses there is. Context is everything.  This is a demographic mis-match. If there were no families living in Templars Hall I suppose the behaviour would fall under youthful joie de vivre and they’d left to their own devices. Although students who go to college primarily to study (they do exist) might still have cause to complain.  However the fact is that families do live in Templar’s Hall.  Many moved out as it became apparent just quite how many houses had been sold to landlords intent on renting to students.  Often those moving out sold to landlords thereby intensifying the problem.  With the property market in Ireland now moribund, those left behind no longer have the option to sell out.  Besides, their children are going to local schools, many of them work locally so why should they?  The main problem I witnessed on Monday wasn’t so much individual behaviour (although some of that was pretty bad) but it was the scale of the problem.  One or two parties in a residential estate are hardly anything to worry about, but loud 4/4 beats coming from every third or fourth house two or three nights a week?  There’s nothing worth commenting on in a group of boisterous twenty year olds walking the street, but when these groups traipse up and down an estate or 50, 20 or even 10 yard intervals all night, filling the air with incoherent laughter and clinking bags, it’s not surprising a family might feel trapped. In that case there is no cruel intention but the effect remains upsetting.  A bottle might be broken on any street, but every corner, every green space, every nook and cranny of an estate where a child might be expected to play out their childhood? Then there’s the simple fact that these are young people, not perhaps best adept at keeping their properties clean, an inadequacy that will extend to the garden, and then the street. Having scant regard for the properties they live in, this lack of respect is, I think, extended to the estate as a whole, and to the people trying to make a life there.  Because the rationale of the partying renters in Templar’s Hall tends to put the blame back on the families living there – “What do they expect?” “Students are going to party, they shouldn’t have moved here”.  Even if this reasoning were sound - which it isn’t - it doesn’t actually absolve them of responsibility for their behaviour. I know he never went to trial, but if he did, I don’t even think Fred West would have argued in court that his victims had it coming “I am Fred West after all”.  It seems to me perfectly true that families and students are not ideal neighbours, but that’s not the fault of the residents, and it doesn’t absolve people from their responsibilities to one another.  There may also be a seperate issue with young men.  While girls were prepared to at least attempt to explain themselves to me, the response of the drunken young men I came across was either “no comment” (a statement which many seemed to believe carried legally binding powers) or “fuck off” (which again was a request I had no legal obligation to comply with).  Drinking in their own groups, the men were loud and raucous, but I couldn’t help thinking that these young men, brought up in the internet age, walked into this estate sober and without the social skills to engage with their neighbours in a way that might create some understanding and report.  This is a highly contentious and subjective statement, but here goes: I think there are many young men whose social skills operate on two settings: morbid shyness and drunken exuberance. Add to that the inevitable herd mentality and primacy of the peer group, and there is a sense in which these men don’t perhaps believe that society exists.  Mrs. Thatcher is often misquoted on this issue of  society. She wasn’t advocating naked individualism (which isn’t to say that’s not what her policies created) but her argument was that “society” came down to the good will, or not, of individuals. There are perhaps too many individuals surrendering their innate decency to a headless, rudderless herd intent on having a “good time” at all costs.