Bowling down through the centre of the country on Friday afternoon en route from Derry to fabled Thurles I tune in to 2FM and hear that there are many thousands of folk already foregathered for the Féile. Also I hear the chief of the local gardai saying that so far the behaviour of all concerned has been 'perfect'.

This is a rock festival. And the head honcho of the fuzz figures that the fans are behaving perfectly.

What, I wondered, idly psyching myself into the mood, are the young people of our little country coming to? It wouldn't have happened in my day. When we hit the Isle of Wight on that glorious yesteryear the rhythmic thunder which rolled out across the sea, and could be heard all the way along the watch-towers, was of cops' knees knocking.

At regular intervals through the Féile weekend we could hear on 2FM - does the Féile sponsor 2FM or is it the other way round? I think we should be told - we could hear police spokespersons quoted as saying the same thing: good behaviour of Féile fans continuing, arrests down, drug seizures down, little trouble, few complaints.

At a press briefing back-stage on Sunday evening, a garda spokesman prematurely summed the weekend up, according it a rave review. "Wrong-doers," he suggested, had stayed away, frightened off by the stern reputation of local DJ (District Justice) O'Reilly. As a result, genuine fans had been able to enjoy themselves to the full, without hassle to themselves or harassment to local people.

"The way the weekend has turned out is a tribute to the young people of Ireland."

It wasn't until Monday - with reports of rapes, an outburst from DJ O'Reilly and the beginnings of the controversy about Chris de Burgh trying to project himself as something other than a stupid little wimp by proving that he's a stupid, offensive little wimp - that another side of Féile was publicly referred to . . .

I'm not sure about some of this. For a start, I'm not sure what the gardai and the gig organisers had in mind as they insisted that, overwhelmingly, Féile fans had been perfectly well-behaved.

The first people I met when I arrived in the square at about seven on the Friday were two teenagers from Dundalk, who approached me greatly distressed, asking if I could help. They'd been attacked in their tent on the main camping site in the morning, their sleeping bags trashed and their tickets stolen. When they'd come back from reporting their problem to gardai, their tent was on fire. I did what I could for them, which wasn't a lot.

Further on, on the pavement opposite Haye's Hotel, I stumbled across an unsteady cluster of young people attempting inexpertly to hoist a young woman in their midst onto her feet. She was squirming and wriggling to resist their attentions, so that her jacket and t-shirt were being pulled half off her. She was weeping and squealing, "Leave me alone, just leave me alone." From the pattern of wetness on her jeans she seemed to have peed herself. She was drunk of course, and none of her friends was exactly sober. They looked 15 or 16.

It was no big deal. I'm sure she came to no harm. She was being looked after, the way people are when they are out with their mates. And it's not for me to moralise about such things anyway. My point is not that the scene was particularly appalling, just that it was by no means untypical of the Féile weekend. And it's this which makes me wonder what the gardai, the local GAA and Official Thurles generally meant when they repeatedly, insistently praised the behaviour of fans as a credit to The Young People of Ireland.

Is the aforementioned not exactly the sort of behaviour which in other circumstances they would strongly disapprove of?

Most media carried estimates of the amount of money injected into the local economy over the weekend. Three million, five million, seven million, take your pick. It's yet another source of mystery to me how these calculations are made. One member of the Semple Stadium Committee said that "The Féile has been more important to Thurles than the sugar factory which closed five years ago," proving that some people involved locally have lost the run of themselves altogether, making it even harder to know what to make of the estimates and guesstimates.

But we can take it that shops, cafés, hotels and guest houses will have done well. And hundreds of local people working on the site on security, or as cleaners and for caterers and so forth, will have made a few quid, and good luck to them. But they weren't the main beneficiaries. Without doubt, the biggest single portion of the money made in Thurles was made by people pushing alcohol at the fans.

From morning to night the pubs of Thurles were jam-packed. I walked from the stadium into the town and back again by another road on Saturday afternoon and again on Sunday evening and every pub I passed seemed under siege, clumps of young people crowding around, begging to be let in, the doors either slammed sternly shut or the way barred by grim bouncers who might select one or two supplicants for admission when somebody managed to slither awkwardly out from the raucous compression inside.

The huge square and streets and alleys off it, and the road from the square to the stadium, were carpeted for most of the weekend with a dishevelment of people drinking from flagons and cans. At Sunday's press briefing we were told that last year 30 tons of cans had been swept up from the streets. This year, the numbers attending being down, we might not make the 30-ton mark, a spokesperson smiled. And, yes, the cans were being shipped off to be recycled. (There was no estimate of the tonnage of flagons recovered, presumably because plastic can't be recycled.)

The river of lager and cider represented by this debris accounted for the street drinking only. Add the drinking in pubs and on-site in Semple Stadium and it's clear that Féile fans swallowed a small ocean of alcohol between them. The effects were obvious, on distressed-out youngsters like those mentioned already, on thousands whose merely-boisterous carousing had a certain entertainment value, on the quietly comatose who littered the streets, some locked in embraces, on the few who involved themselves in flurries of fisticuffs and incompetent mills.

I'm not complaining or condemning. I have been that soldier and, under whisky provocation, can occasionally make a fair fist of it still. But tell me this: if young people behaved in O'Connell Street in Dublin on a Friday or Saturday night the way thousands behaved in Thurles over the Féile weekend - leaving aside thefts, assaults and rapes which we will assume only subsequently came to light - would the local garda boss and spokespersons for the business community praise their behaviour as perfect?

Already this summer we have had a raft of reports about a "crisis" in the cities, especially in Dublin, caused by young people running wild. Tourism bosses, spokespersons for traders' associations and gardai have been widely quoted expressing alarm about the numbers of teenagers gathering in threatening crowds in city centres.

A couple of months back the woman who acts as parliamentary parrot for police chiefs and Justice Department officials, Maire Geogheghan-Quinn, undertook a ceremonial safari along O'Connell Street, accompanied only by a regiment of cops and a flock of photographers, to observe the horrendous scenes for herself.

We have read regularly of anguished complaints from lovers of law 'n' order about the gardai being powerless to intervene and give these grungy street-hooligans the good hammering they deserve. New laws were necessary, it's been argued, to enable the boys and girls in blue to compel gatherings of young people to "move on." A Sunday Independent piece last month approvingly quoted "an old-style Dublin detective": "Twenty years ago, if you saw them standing around you told them to move on, and if one of them told you to fuck off you hit him a belt into the jaw. The next time you met he had respect for you. The do-gooders have stopped all that."

The Indo and its "old-style Dublin detective" will be happier now. Sure enough, a new law is in prospect to give gardai the power to clear the capital's streets of people who might be doing nothing which currently constitutes an offence but which nevertheless might be regarded as offensive by straight-laced citizens or valuable visitors.

Why so? Because young people on the razzle in the streets in Dublin in large numbers is deemed bad for business.

But do the same thing in Thurles on the August weekend and you're patronised for the colourful ambience of your company. Because in Thurles during the Féile it's deemed good for business.

Whatever makes money for the business community is accounted moral. Whatever puts profit-margins in danger is denounced as disgraceful.

The cynicism of it is obvious. Which brings us to the GAA. Michael Lanigan of the stadium committee said that he had been "very disappointed" to learn about de Burgh ripping a woman's clothes off down to her waist while singing 'Patricia the Stripper'. The committee would have to discuss "the incident".

The de Burgh "incident" was more reprehensible than a number of others involving nudity or near nudity on stage which attracted attention. As co-ordinator of the National Association of Parents sensibly put it: "If the woman had undressed herself" (which, after all, is what strippers do) "it would not have been nearly as bad . . . It was a violent act, even with the woman's approval."

Quite so. But that aside, can we take it that nobody on the stadium committee, or on the Tipperary County Board, was "disappointed" also by, for example, the scene in the Jim Rose Circus performance in which "Mr Lifto" took out his penis, attached a chain to the ring which he had inserted through it, and swung a weight from the chain. It certainly made his penis stretch, and my eyes water. And if this is what he does, and people want to watch, again, I've no problem.

I do have a problem, though, accepting that the GAA would be entirely happy with Mr. Lifto presenting his act on their premises had it not been part of a package from which the association confidently expected to make serious money.

It wouldn't do to get too po-faced or purist about this, of course. We all do things for money which we wouldn't do gratis. But these people shudder at the idea of soccer in their stadia. And then smile indulgently at a stretched-out pierced penis presented as entertainment for all ages?

All this is not just cynical, but also political. Which in a roundabout way takes us back to the beginning.

The reason the establishment trembled (slightly) at rock festivals away back in the beginning was that the music was vaguely, romantically regarded as having a political charge, as expressing in some distorted way an elemental upsurge against the established order of things. A lot of this turned out to be illusion. But it felt real enough at the time.

It didn't exist even as a feeling at Féile. And that also, I think, helps explain the strange indulgence of establishment elements towards behaviour they would elsewhere, otherwise have wanted to crack down on.

They've given up trying to make young people "moral". Even the Catholic Church keeps its mouth shut most times now, the better not to be laughed at. If it's not interfering directly with business, and especially if it's actually giving business a boost, then anything goes. Let schoolgirls collapse paralytic on the pavements or screw in the gutter in broad day-light, sure what harm? It keeps them out of harm's way.

As long as they don't get riled up about there being no jobs in prospect for most of them and shit jobs for most of the rest, as long as they don't think to one another to rise up in wrath about being treated like dirt and forced into "workfare", as long as they aren't organised in rage against the fact that their future is already fenced around with lies amid the country they live in secured for the brigands and thieves, as long as they don't pose a threat to the established sick order, nobody in the establishment gives a flying fuck about them or about anything they do.

But if anything of anger, the merest hint of threat, shimmered through the vibe associated with Féile, then the unkempt hordes of fine young people would be made into objects of hatred and fear.

It's when they openly hate you for having a good time that you'll know you've gotten it right.