Exploitation of Irish School Leavers
As surely as the swallows fly to Capistrano, thousands of Leaving Certificate students will be jetting off this summer to places like Ibiza, Cyprus, and Crete in pursuit of the great group bacchanal abroad, a ritual born of cheap airfare and encouraged by any number of package tour operators.
Once free from parents, the young ones may engage in wholesome activities like bungee jumping, jet skiing, or swimming in warm seas — and have the time of their lives. But for many, oblivion is the real goal and the stories are legion of mass drunkenness in these resorts, with the Irish sharing the flag with the Brits.
Learning to Go Cretan:
Last summer, my nineteen year-old son Harris and twelve fellow Leavers flew off to the hotspot of Hersonissos in Crete, that island now being annually invaded by nearly as many young Irish people as it was by German paratroopers in 1941. If only the British army exhorted the Cretans and some Celtic transplants to employ the same tricks as they work on arrivals from Dublin and Cork, the Germans would have been stopped cold.
The Budget Travel deal called for my son’s group to be holed up chock-a-block in a sprawling budget resort. “How bad?” Harris remarked.
Their initial choices were tough — if you got tired of sipping beers with pretty girls by the pool, you could roll to the beach outside the door.
It was my son’s money on the table, hard-earned from a part-time job, and if he were back in his native U.S. he could well be shipping out at the same age to Kabul with a flak jacket in hand.
Hot and Kul:
“Got n safe, place kul,” came the first text message. Our son had logged long voyages on the Asgard II, loved landing in foreign countries and even sampling exotic food — and he was a solid young man. So we said “go for it.”
“Havin blast!” came text 2, Day 3.
Too much joy in a teenager is suspicious. So I checked the Internet and discovered that touts line the streets of Hersonissos, beckoning the young into various dens to try the resort’s signature “Head F..er.” This is a devil’s brew of Baileys, chilly powder, tequila, vodka, gin, and cider served in a fish bowl with two straws. No wonder the biggest night club is called Amnesia.
I had watched Harris’s group grow from boys to young men. Now they were being offered diminutive shots of beer to be drunk in a succession of 100 without the merest pause for breath. One hundred shots of beer on the bar, one hundred shots of beer, if you take every one down fast and don’t pass it around, you win a free t-shirt.
100 Shots of Beer on the Wall:
Incredibly, one of his friends managed it.
It didn’t matter, they all still danced in circles and smash plates on the ground in Irish-themed joints boasting names like Temple Bar and Pog Mahones. Many stay open until 9 a.m.
In Hersonossis, there are plenty of specials on the chalk boards – three tequilas for the price of one, and so on. Restraints are a thousand miles behind.
All a laugh, the kids say. But then again the Irish were just crowned the biggest binge drinkers in Europe. Where does it all start, many wonder. Perhaps touts abroad should be added to the influence mix.
Scores of Irish and English students get transported to the A&E in the big Greek and Cyprian resorts every week comatose from drink or worse, and flocks of girls show up after dawn in Crete’s Heraklion hospital desperately seeking a “morning after” pill. That’s the price of all those adult-organized wet t-shirt and foam parties.
At Cork airport the Sunday night my son’s group returned, most of the young Leavers from various groups were still glowing from their first trip abroad, and looking fit and tanned.
But a few looked brain dead, like 18 year-olds returning from a gas attack in World War 1. One had welts all over his face, his eyes nearly swollen closed. I heard his friend say, “Connor passed out seven times yesterday. That was his record. He thinks he just fell down some stairs, but he doesn’t remember.”
If I were that one’s parents, I would hope he wasn’t bungee jumping.
A couple of returnees were soon carted off to Cork’s Regional University Hospital
I asked my son Harris if he had gone haywire himself?
“Not really. I was the designated driver?”
“But you don’t even have a license!”
“I drove a quad.”
“Mother of God.”
What parents haven’t tasted such extreme? I mean, I went to Woodstock.
But what bothered me most about this cocked-up ritual of the post- Leaving Cert foreign bash until you crash, the Her So Inebria, was its dark underbelly. Though rare, the annual reports of rapes and drownings occurring in every summer’s rite of passage are brutally real. More fundamentally, this excess is fed by an industry of exploitation led by adults who know exactly what they are encouraging.
Tour Operators Target Youth:
Just check out Sun Holidays profile of the Cretan resort of Malia: “Young crowds flock to lovely Malia year after year, thanks to its buzzing all-night vibe, miles of golden sandy beaches and huge variety of restaurants and bars.”
Under “useful information,” this operator’s third listing is Drink. “Bottle of beer euro 2.00.”
Similar pitches lurk in the promos of many other operators. Groups like Holidays Online advertise on Bebo, while youth radio station Spin 103 targets the schools and Leaving Cert Holidays.Com leaves little to the imagination. In 2008, Budget Travel stuck 170 Irish Leavers in a single holiday complex in Gouves, Crete, where families on holiday were revolted by a Dublin 4 crowd that, amongst other things, urinated in the pool.
My son swears his group did nothing like that. Yet it was troubling to watch a number of them drinking more regularly for a while after they returned from Crete.
It may be impossible to keep kids of a certain age from testing their limits. But that doesn’t mean parents should pay the piper or look the other way either.
