March 17th is, as you all know, St. Patric’s day. The day when everyone is a little bit Irish and Guinness, Bailey’s or whiskey (note the ‘e’ in whiskey) is mandatory. Paddy’s day is thing to celebrate and we know all about that. Or at least, we try… Yesterday was the day of Paddy’s ball. A long awaited and much planned for party arranged by the DCU Student Union and DCU Snowboarding. (I have no idea what the snowboarding club has to do with this, or even why an Irish college has a snowboarding club – ain’t much snow ’round here – but I’m sure they have loads of fun.)

The party was held at The Helix, a large venue here on campus, with room for hundreds of people, a large stage and a nice little bar. Only the reception hall was used for this party, and with I believe some 500+ tickets sold I was expecting the place to be crowded and spirits high. Not the case. Peaking at we-can-still-get-seats-level and with a fairly narrow minded DJ playing hardly dance-able music it was easy to see we were heading down hill.

What I was most baffled by was the way they arranged the bar. In front of the permanent bar was placed a second movable bar and a queue system was in place where you had to queue in one end and exit the other, kind of like in a shop. Seven people were working the bar, some of them behind the permanent bar pouring beers, others in front behind the movable bar mixing “drinks” and pouring bottles into plastic cups. The service was so slow I think we spent close to 30 minutes per round. (The guard telling people to go around to the other side to queue didn’t look happy either by the way.)

Comparing this to the nightclub I used to work where we serve 800+ guests with 6-7 barmen, all capable of mixing drinks and two doing advanced cocktails, I can’t call this anything but a disaster. And the fact that the organizers didn’t see that two bars without organized queues would speed up the process 100-fold doesn’t make any better. Sorry folks – the bar chaos-system is tried and tested world wide; and used world wide. Get with the program – it works!

At about 0115 the fire alarm went off. Everyone was evacuated resulting in an unruly crowd and three assaulted volunteers. The whole thing turned out to be sabotage as several break-glass alarm points were smashed, one I believe being jammed with a nail. The clock inched towards closing time and with no working fire detection system the whole thing was called off and people were let in in small groups to collect their jackets. All in all, a pretty bad party.

The whole thing was pretty sad. There was a great potential in this – the venue is fantastic, the anticipation and expectations were great and it would have been the perfect way to start St. Paddy’s day bank holiday weekend. Not blaming the SU or the Snowboarding club for the fire alarm story, and recognizing that they have probably worked very hard to set this up, I have to say the result left a lot to be desired.