Students’ St. Patrick’s Day revels celebrate their entitlement

Irish eyes may be smiling on this St. Patrick’s Day.

Stressed-out police, paramedics, emergency-room workers and university officials in cities across southern Ontario will not.

March 17 has become a bad excuse for a day-long drunk-fest that disrupts neighbourhoods, results in personal injury and property damage, while unfairly burdening health and law-enforcement services that the public — not the young, inebriated louts — must pay for. And it gets worse every year.

Consider that in response to the 20,000 university, college and high school students expected to storm Waterloo’s Ezra Avenue near Wilfrid Laurier University today, Waterloo Regional Police will be out in full force, backed up by Peel Region officers.

They vow to charge lawbreakers and keep the street open.

Good luck to them.

The common refrain from student partiers in Waterloo and elsewhere is they have a right to party.

Sounds like they’re saying everyone else can be damned.

In Hamilton, McMaster University is funding extra police officers to manage the student parties. There will be RIDE checks, mounted police officers, patrol officers and a dedicated dispatcher to handle service calls from two, critical neighbourhoods.

Brock University administrators have stepped up security plans and hired seven extra police officers to keep the lid on student celebrations in St. Catharines and Thorold neighbourhoods.

Police in Kingston will try to restrain boisterous Queen’s University students, while in London, Ont., police are trying to convince Western University and Fanshawe College students to behave.

In 2012, St. Patrick’s Day celebrations near that college erupted into a riot that saw a TV news truck torched and revelers hurling bottles at police who intervened.

That was ugly, but not entirely exceptional. In Waterloo last year, police laid 208 charges, not for just public intoxication, but criminal offences such as assault, theft and drug possession. In 2015, four people were stabbed at a St. Patrick’s Day house party near McMaster.

It’s hard to figure out how one of the most civilized and educated nations on Earth has reached a point where so many of its best and brightest young people think it’s normal, acceptable and impressive to drink until they’re falling down, throwing up, urinating in public and smashing things as well as laws.

Who told them it’s a necessary rite of passage, a part of campus life worth celebrating in selfies?

It’s none of these things and it is not just middle-aged prudes saying so.

Far from being innocuous occasions to kick back and unwind from academic pressures, this is deeply anti-social behaviour.

The selfish narcissists who participate in it have no regard for the larger community, on St. Patrick’s Day at least.

They don’t care if they damage property or relations with non-student neighbours.

They don’t care if they overburden emergency services and emergency rooms.

They don’t care if the rest of the community pleads with them to stop.

They don’t care if they hurt a city they’ll probably leave after graduation.

We can only hope it doesn’t take something truly awful to happen for this disgraceful tide of excess to be turned back.