Donegal Town News and Blog

Send in your fight videos, there’s probably a lot of this going on.

A video clip of Donegal students brawling on a school playing pitch has been circulating on mobile phones around the town in recent days. It features pupils wearing Abbey Vocational School uniforms fighting on the school’s all-weather pitch, and outside SuperValu Shopping Centre in Donegal town. Somebody appears to have put effort and time into editing footage of four different fights into a single 50-second film. It opens with a group of teenage boys surrounding two lads who start fighting. Several of the animated onlookers are holding mobile phones with the obvious intention of recording the action. The protagonists trade blows as their classmates egg them on, before the scene switches to the car park outside the Glebe Shopping Centre. It’s not just boys either: the clip also includes footage of two girls kicking and punching each other, tearing at each other’s hair and generally acting in a manner not usually expected of young women. The Abbey Vocational School principal Emmanuel McCormack said his school had a good reputation and hoped that such behaviour by a small number of pupils would not ruin that. “Obviously, any fighting we come across we take action and the pupils are suspended,” he said. “We are appalled, but we take a common sense approach and supervise the best we can. I would hope that the reason the video clip ends after 50 seconds is that a member of staff came along and put a stop to the fighting.” Mr McCormack said fights were not a regular occurrence at the AVS but he acknowledged they happen, and said it was worrying that mobile phones were used to film them. “We have a big area to cover but we’re doing our best with supervision,” he added.