When the dust settled after the festival there had been 90 arrests, including a large number for assault and theft, 308 drug seizures, 28 cases of alleged drug dealing, and multiple teenagers had been stabbed — no, not the Swedish House mafia gig, but last year’s Oxegen festival.
The infamous events at the Phoenix Park have cast a welcome spotlight on Ireland’s drinking culture, but the rush to judgment in some quarters — with everything from dance music to MCD being blamed for the orgy of violence and drunkenness — ignores one salient point: this is nothing new.
The only reason that the public reaction has been so outraged is because the fighting and drinking was shoved in people’s faces when it was transferred from the obscurity of Punchestown to a densely populated area of central Dublin.
"Too many people were there to drink themselves stupid and had no interest in the music", "security staff were more worried about people getting into the arena with alcohol than the safety of others", "looting and vandalism was the only way it could be described" are just a flavour of the comments posted on social networking sites about last year’s festival, which received scant media coverage at the time.
Before the "it wouldn’t have happened in my day" brigade begin to feel too smug about their rose-tinted youth, it should be noted that punk gigs in the 1970s were not renowned for their decorousness, while the masses attending Bob Dylan in Slane in the early 1980s were inexplicably inspired to riot by his set of anti-war folk songs.
Regrettably, an acute dose of selective amnesia about these historical events seems to have infected many of the middle-aged commentators now wringing their hands and castigating an entire generation after the, admittedly, deplorable scenes at the Phoenix Park.
With an army of pop-psychologists and armchair sociologists resorting to lazy stereotypes and naked bigotry in their efforts to diagnose what went wrong earlier this month, the unpalatable truth is that this sort of anti-social behaviour is evident in towns and cities all over the country every night of the week — you don’t have to buy a ticket for an MCD event in order to witness brawls, under-age drinking and licentiousness.
Usually, however, this sort of bawdy behaviour is confined to dark streets in the early hours of the morning and does not take place in a public park in the middle of the day and in full view of horrified families, many of whom spent the afternoon fleeing hordes of marauding drunks.
So, instead of the usual knee-jerk reactionary bleating about how debauched young people, and their devil music, are all going to hell in a handcart, perhaps it would be more useful to have a wider debate on the only thing we know with any degree of certainty — this country has a long-standing, dysfunctional relationship with alcohol which, as well as costing the state an estimated €3.7bn annually, is a contributory factor in 78% of suicides, our other unspoken epidemic.
Source: Irish Examiner, 18/07/12
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