No room for messing

An increase in outdoor socialising in the College Road area may be due to front rooms being converted into bedrooms.

At a community safety forum on Tuesday night, residents living on the road highlighted an increase in outdoor drinking and students becoming disorientated and attempting to gain access to the wrong houses at night.

One resident on Connaught Avenue said that what began as students doing runaway knock, has now escalated to students attempting to gain entrance to property.

The resident said: “Since the start of term, we’ve had an issue with students going up and down the street, but recently they’ve started coming on to the property, and instead of doing knock and run, they’ve been shouldering doors.

“In the last four weeks I’ve had students trying to open doors. They’ve caused a bit of damage.

“A lot of it is the spill over from Connaught Park. I’ve spoken to a few of the students and they’ve said they no longer have living rooms. They’ve been converted to bedrooms, so a lot of them are socialising in the park.”

Another resident claimed that her door had been broken and she was forced to install metal bars, while a third complained of chips and hamburgers being pushed through her letterbox.

Garda Peter O’Riordan, who attended the forum, said that gardaí were aware of people knocking on doors and were monitoring the situation.

Responding to the issues raised, Gary Mulcahy of the UCC Campus Watch told the Cork Independent that they were doing their best to tackle the problem, and that efforts have been “very successful” in recent years. “The relations between students and local residents are definitely improving. Student anti-social behaviour represents a very, very small minority of students, considering the amount of students at UCC. They’re unfortunately giving all our students a bad name,” he said.

Mr Mulcahy said that the UCC Campus Watch deals with a variety of issues and that it is now getting to a point where students are “listening a lot more”.

“We have ten student rules that all students sign up to when they register. The Campus Watch deals with any allegation of a breach of those rules,” he said.