with there being people content with the excitement of just being somewhere that isn't home, and of experiencing the alternative environment of the ocean.

Whatever the connection with swimming, many Irish seaside resorts have gone to hell, and are getting worse.

Within the last ten years or so they've become Jekyll and Hyde places which not long after dark become no-go areas for adults and children. Ask anyone who lives in a seaside resort within reach of a centre of population and they'll tell you that their little place becomes a scene of drunk teenagers, broken glass, fights, vomiting, bad, stupid language, sexual aggression, and violence to other people and themselves on all summer weekends and especially on bank holiday weekends.

The kids begin by roaming around the place displaying themselves to each other in time-honoured fashion, and as far as that goes, the best of luck to them . . . if only they would retire to someplace dark and concentrate on doing forbidden things to each other all would be well. But as the hours wear on and the crowd trawls between discos and pubs and they take whatever else it is they take besides the cans and the flagons and the cocktails, the level of aggression rises and rises, and they start throwing lifebelts into the sea and beer barrels through plate glass windows and to punch each other and to show off by jumping into their cars and revving off into the night where they're very likely to kill someone else as well as themselves. That's the boys. The dishevelled girls are weeping drunkenly on someone's shoulder because some boy they'd offered themselves to couldn't be bothered to take advantage of them.

These kids, as individuals, are, presumably, perfectly nice. Their parents would not recognise what they become after midnight. But in fact their parents are paying good money, and the teenagers are paying with whatever money they have of their own, to become as squalid and vulnerable as they do become. The money is going to the publicans and disco owners.

It is an amazing aspect of Irish capitalism that few people even stop to wonder at the fact that seaside resorts are handed over every weekend to a few individuals, for them to make huge profits.

Anyone who can sell drink in or near a disco is sitting on enough cash to seriously embarrass him or her. Whatever they might pay towards sweeping up the litter and glass and sick on the streets and boarding up whatever windows got smashed during the night is a fleabite out of their profits.

It beats me that the minister for justice worries, as he should, about the social value of casinos, which exist to take money from grown people who might be expected to have sense and who are probably sober.

Yet he doesn't seem to worry about latenight pubs, which exist to take money from people . . . young people . . . by selling them the mind-altering substance, alcohol. If private profit-making is ever questionable, surely it is in or around the issues this raises, particularly given the huge social and emotional cost of the assaults, car crashes, and suicides which . . . though it isn't nice to say it . . . are largely due to the young people concerned being drunk.

The gardai know all about this. They are the only representatives of adult Ireland on the streets and proms of the seaside resorts when the kids begin their apresdisco riots. We're paying them to police the melees caused by the profit-making of the publicans and the disco owners.

Most places need far more gardai on summer weekends than can be deployed.

The only suggestion I've seen about what to do about all this, given that the young have to go somewhere to find each other and given that no one may interfere with private profit, was made by Donogh O'Loughlin, who's chairman of Lahinch community council . . . Lahinch is one of the troubled resorts. He suggested that fire officers should liaise with the gardai with a view to allowing only as many people in each pub as can be policed at closing time.

That is . . . I use my words, not his . . . the total of kids allowed to get drunk in any one resort shouldn't be more, when they're put out on the street, than the local gardai have personnel to police. This would obviously be a help. But it doesn't say much for how Ireland takes its pleasures, does it ? And what do we do next? Send in the army?