Where can teens hang out this summer?

Our long secondary school holidays are a legacy of the time when children throughout the country were needed to work on farms.

But for a small minority of teenagers such as Cathríona Clarke (16), the summer months still mean a 6am start most mornings on the family's dairy farm in Lacken, Co Mayo.

“It’s easier work to be in school,” jokes Cathríona, who has also been involved in recent years in helping to organise Co Mayo’s biggest teenage summer party – known as “Band on the Strand”. Although this June it turned out to be “Band on the Pitch”, when they realised they had got their tide calculations wrong for the first time in the 10-year history of the event and it had to be relocated to the local GAA club at very short notice.

“It is something different for the youth to be doing – an outdoor concert,” says Cathríona, who is a member of the Lacken Foróige club which hosts the event.

“For a lot of young people there are not a lot of places to go that are safe, supervised and non-alcoholic and no drugs,” she says. “It’s somewhere for young people to go, where their parents know they are going to be safe, as well as being just great fun.”

While there’s plenty of swimming and surfing for teenagers in this coastal area, there is not a lot otherwise for young people to do, she says, “other than hang around parks, or hang around town or go to each other’s houses”.

“I am lucky that from a young age I have been involved in sports and Foróige and I have always had a lot of things to do during the summer. But some of my friends, all they would do is hang around town.

“I know it is a bit stereotypical but when you’re hanging around town, some people just get involved in drink – that is how a lot of people would get involved in alcohol and drugs, through boredom during the summer.”

In a very different setting, on the other side of the country, Jack Kelly (15) from Hartstown, in Dublin 15, usually meets his friends in Blanchardstown Centre "because it's local. We just walk around the place, all around the area. We would probably go to each other's houses as well."

He believes it would be good to have a drop-in centre for teenagers: “I think a lot of people would go to it, just to get out somewhere.”

Jack is involved in Seo É Foróige Hartstown and has done a four-day summer camp in digital music there that cost only €10. “It’s really good – you do so much in it.” While he knows that structured activities are not for everybody, he also thinks teenagers are unaware of all the things going on.

"A lot of people just want to be left alone. But I think it's better when people get involved and there are more people to talk to; it helps you socially as well," says Kelly, who will be taking the first module in Foróige's leadership course at Maynooth University in August, after he returns from two weeks in Spain with his family.

Certainly Kelly, the middle of three boys in his family and who has just done his Junior Cert, doesn’t think the summer holidays are too long. “Everybody will find something they want to do during the summer.”