As Final Fridays occur across Ireland, schools are struggling to foil the car-egging, Rickrolling plans of departing students
HAVE YOU EVER been egged? Teepeed? What about a Rickroll? As thousands of Leaving Cert students celebrate their last days in the school system, and local shops sell out of toilet paper, teachers and principals are taking a deep collective breath. The sixth-year prank is getting more and more dastardly as social networking sites, online forums and Twitter spread news of the most imaginative Final Friday strokes.
International pranks are getting into the mix, too: the Rickroll is now part of the Irish Final Friday. (The Rickroll involves hijacking the school intercom or PA system at a key moment, such as the graduation ceremony, and cutting in with a version of Never Gonna Give You Up by 1980s quiff jockey Rick Astley.)
Teepeeing, or wrapping cars, trees and even schools in toilet paper, has been a Final Friday favourite since Astley rolled first time around. The egging of teachers’ cars has become such a problem in one Dublin school that the principal attempted to eradicate the traditional Final Friday altogether.
At St Andrew’s College in Booterstown, Co Dublin, principal Arthur Godsil suggested changing the sixth-year barbecue from the morning to the afternoon this year, to head the madness off at the pass. Students defended their festivities, however, and, thanks to the considerable debating prowess of the school’s Model United Nations, there was a compromise. Yesterday’s Final Friday was, in the words of Godsil, “the most magnificent ever”.
Other schools do not seem so democratic. In Cork, where there have been problems with overzealous pranksters in recent years, some schools have devised ways to take the heat out of the last days. Last year three sixth-years from Christian Brothers CBC were banned from the premises following a series of pranks involving the nearby Scoil Mhuire girls’ school. Pupils were asked to stay at home after they entered the girls school, threw eggs and staged a “kidnapping”. Every parent at the school subsequently received a letter from principal Tony McCarthy warning similar shenanigans could lead to a ban on sitting the Leaving Cert.
This year there are already reports of a Cork city girls’ school sealing off the school gates with Garda tape. “Wherever there is a group of schools close together you tend to get trouble,” says Aidan Twomey, deputy principal of Presentation Brothers College in Mardyke in Cork. “We’re lucky here because we’re out on our own, but there is a cluster of schools in Cork that have had quite a bit to deal with.”
At Presentation they’ve handled the problem by diluting the end of year so that the Final Friday is hard to define. It’s fiendishly clever, if a bit dull. “We don’t tell the students when the end of term is going to be. Classes run right up until the Leaving Cert, and students are free to attend, or not, as they choose,” says Twomey. “They can’t quite identify a ‘last day’, so that takes the punch out of it. Sorry, that’s very boring isn’t it?”
Castleknock Community College in Dublin has also devised ingenious ways to confuse its sixth years. “We hold our graduation in the afternoon, and not on the school premises,” says principal John Cronin, who insists it is for logistical reasons rather than a ruse to trick students. Either way, he says, his students are a “great bunch” and there’s no trouble.
ONE DUBLIN SCHOOL has banned students from leaving the premises on the last day, because they had taken to mooning on the main road and egging their female neighbours.
Principals bent on scuppering pranksters would do well to peruse the internet in the weeks coming up Final Friday. Students are busy on boards.ie and Facebook, giving away valuable tactical information. One current thread on boards.ie (and it’s not the only one in this vein) begins with the following call to arms: “End of the year, and end of our time in Secondary School (smiley face). So, we’re obviously expected to mess around! So, people, me needs inspiration!! Tell me ones you’ve heard about, ones that you’re plannin to do and ones you’d like to do but can’t!!”
Pages of suggestions follow, but to detail them would be very irresponsible. Suffice to say you should lock up your labs, aquariums, car parks and staffrooms. And frisk students for prawns, stink bombs, expanding foam, bags of frozen cow’s blood and Rick Astley. Just in case.
