“If there are buses coming from Sligo and Galway to Castlebar for a teenage disco, there is only one thing on the people’s mind and that’s to abuse alcohol.” That was the opinion of Superintendent Willie Keaveney who was speaking at the Castlebar joint policing committee in relation to teenage discos in the town.
Mayor Michael Kilcoyne opened the debate by reading a letter from a parent which had been sent to him after his son was assaulted at a Halloween teenage disco in the town and had to be taken to hospital. The gardaí were unable to identify who carried out the assault, but it is believed those who carried out the assault came from the Tuam area, according to Mayor Kilcoyne. Supt Keavney told the meeting that “the incident happened inside the disco and despite going through hours of CCTV footage we were unable to identify the attacker, some of the CCTV was very good quality while some was hard to see people due to lights being turned low in the venue for the disco.”
Sinn Féin councillor Therese Ruane said that the best way to avoid outsiders coming into town for these kind of events was to try to run a system which is used in Galway, where the schools and venues get together and only those who were going to the schools involved would be allowed entry to the disco.
Mayor Kilcoyne told the meeting that a sub committee of the joint policing committee had met with the operators of the venues that are used for teenage discos last week, and the operators told them that they would examine the concerns and ideas raised, but they were informed that both venues were commercial operations and made commercial decisions.
A lot of the problems arise from youths drinking on buses coming into the town, Supt Keaveney told the meeting. “We have carried out stops and searches on buses coming into town looking for alcohol, but we had one incident where one bus coming from the Galway area which was informed of these searches turned off in Claremorris and came into Castlebar via Swinford and Foxford to avoid being searched,” he revealed. He also told the meeting that he has written to all the coach operators who are bringing people to the town to inform them of their responsibilities and the possibility of them losing their PSV licence if they are caught doing anything against the law.
“The biggest issue of concern is that parents will allow their children to come as far as Castlebar from Galway or Sligo and let them be unsupervised for such long periods of time,” the superintendent added. “Parents need to know where their children are.”
