COMMENT: The stark reality of the post-pub college party in Ireland

College parties: the home of dented beer cans, sloppy shifts and deep meaningful conversations with your own reflection.

As anyone who has spent even one semester in university will know, the impromptu college party is like making friends with the weirdo on orientation day – something you simply cannot avoid.

And why would you want to?

They’re a veritable haven after you’ve been booted out of the pub, and can’t imagine going home alone.

And then you get there.

And there’s much less drink than you were promised, a lot more gobshites than you anticipated, and an overpowering smell from the kitchen bin.

And suddenly you regret ever ‘accidentally overhearing’ session-talk from a group who you knew lived a stone’s throw from the local.

"I’ve brought this on myself,” you’ll think as you begin checking kitchen cupboards for booze – not that students actually keep their hooch anywhere as predictable as the kitchen cupboard, but you’re desperate.

If you haven’t spent an awkward hour slugging from a can you liberated from beneath a stained cushion while your friend – who promised she wouldn’t disappear upstairs – disappears upstairs, were you even in college?

They say university is about furthering your prospects and broadening your horizons, but we all know it’s about the experiences that take place outside the lecture hall.

Frantic phonecalls home, furtive stealing of food, and feverish but ultimately disappointing relationships are what the vast majority of us remember about our time as students.

Oh, and the parties.

The late nights we found ourselves with seven random strangers who hid their enthusiasm for Dungeons and Dragons until there was no escape.

The early mornings we spent huddled beneath a coat in the hallway of a student house after realising we lost our purses and didn’t have the money for a taxi home.

The times we thought doing the robot on a kitchen table held up with a Psychology textbook would be gas craic until we ended up in A&E.

A college party wouldn’t be a college party without a dank brown carpet, a pyramid of empty cans, and one randomer in a stolen coat who no one knows.

If teen movies were to be believed, we’d rock up to a student house, be handed a red plastic cup full of vodka, and leave looking as good as we did ten hours earlier when we put the finishing touches on our winged eyeliner.

But college parties in Ireland don’t work like that.

You’re either too drunk to be a functioning member of society or you’re too sober to look past the mould growing on the inside of the fridge.

You attend because you’re mad for the shift, your mate is mad for the jacks and you heard someone came back from holidays with more Bacardi than you could shake a stick at.

You stay because it’s cold outside, someone mentioned grilling a few waffles, and your mate – who disappeared upstairs – inexplicably has your phone.

And you leave looking like you’ve been through a war despite the fact the atmosphere was as much use as Beyoncé in an elevator, and you once got your hands on more alcohol at mass.

And yet the thing that keeps bringing you back to these random gatherings is the memory – the memory of that one heady night when the stars aligned, the drink flowed, and the college party was everything you had dreamed of and more.

You were hilarious, they were hilarious, and nobody hid their booze in the washing machine.

Like an addict, you desperately try to recreate that high, and find yourself wandering deserted housing estates at 2am in search of a gaf party that your man in the chipper said would be chock-full of cans

It wasn’t of course, but there’s always next time.