Jack Leahy & Fionn O’Dea
News Editor & Deputy News Editor
Following a national radio discussion in which serious allegations of public order offenses were made against third-level students, Liveline producers have stated that there was ‘no implied connection’ between reports of a drunken students urinating on a homeless man and a wider discussion on drinking culture at Trinity Halls.
A Dublin-based taxi driver contacted Joe Duffy’s popular phone-in show this afternoon regarding a number of incidents that allegedly took place on St. Stephen’s Green last night. ‘Michael’ told Duffy that while Wednesdays are traditionally a big student night, the behaviour witnessed on the Green last night included public urination, a major issue of confrontation, and four students ‘laughing and thinking it was very funny’ as they urinated on a homeless man sleeping in a doorway.
He also claimed that students involved in the incidents had arrived on private coaches from their accommodation.
Several taxi drivers then contacted the show in support of the original claims of student misconduct on a Wednesday night in St. Stephen’s Green, offering observations of students soiling taxis and causing damage under the influence of alcohol.
However, a Rathmines resident’s claims regarding the conduct of Trinity Halls students led to further callers conflating the issues of public urination and what they described as ‘over-priviliged’ Trinity students. Some callers claimed to have contacted the College this afternoon to lodge complaint against the conduct of its students, despite no specific claims relating to last night’s headline incidents being leveled against Halls students.
The caller expressed her outrage at students’ drinking habits:
‘It happens on the second Wednesday of every September of every year – before they can drop their bags, they are down to Tesco in Rathmines [to] get cartloads of this beer. They flood out of halls, intoxicated, these the next “scholars of Ireland” being produced in Trinity Halls. I believe it’s mayhem on the Luas. some of them look like they’ve only made their confirmation.’
Taking exception at the ‘very bad impression’ of Halls being portrayed, one caller then defended its students and the running of the facility, saying that, as a mother, she found the facility to be ‘some of the safest accommodation you can find in Dublin’. She also reminded listeners that security is so tight at Halls that security staff take issue with a transgression as innocent as careless parking.
Speaking to The University Times, JCR Halls President David Henry simply stated that his committee had not organised a bus to Dandelion for the event because it was not a Halls event.
