Dramagroup premises ransacked

February 1995

MINDLESS marauders have left a local community drama group fighting to keep their award-winning service open in Bray. Members of the Dry Rain Youth Theatre Group are faced with a bill for thousands of pounds following a break-in last weekend in which intruders set out to systematically destroy the premises. In spite of the fact that their centre at An Lar, Lower Dargle Road, was twice before targeted for burglaries, volunteers were still shocked by the scale of the destruction last Monday morning. The raiders battered a hole through the ceiling to get into premises after gaining access to the building through a roof. They came prepared, for it’s reckoned the intruders must have used a lump hammer or a similar tool to smash their way through an internal partition wall after being confronted with a steel shutter in the centre’s office doorway. The vandals also destroyed valuable theatre sets, wrecked costly TV and video equipment, smashed office furniture and ransacked the premises in a spree of the pointless destruction. But their efforts yielded them little for there were no real valuables on the premises, leaving heart-broken volunteers to count the cost and wonder at the logic behind such an attack.

‘It’s very difficult to figure out the point of it all given that we keep very little of value on the premises other than for our own work as a group,’ said Dry Rain’s Padraigin Hughes.

‘Dry Rain is a drama group for the people of Bray, so whoever did this has only succeeded in attacking the ordinary people of the community.‘We are still assessing the damage, but it looks like it will run into thousands of pounds,’ said Alan Clarke, another volunteer.