From broken glass to a ‘touch of class' over Kinsale window

By Kieran O’Mahony

A KINSALE man has described the actions of a group of drunken lads as a ‘touch of class’ after they dropped  €200 through his father’s letterbox the morning after one of them fell into one of his windows and smashed it. 

Since Nick McCarthy posted the incident and pictures on his Facebook page on St Patrick’s Day, it has been shared nearly 13,000 times and liked 73,000 times. Nick’s post went viral within days.

‘It’s been a crazy few days since I put up the post and I was getting loads of notifications and invites on Facebook and I had to turn off my phone in the end,’ Nick told The Southern Star.

‘It was such a nice gesture that my father said to put it up on Facebook and maybe someone in Kinsale would see it, but we had no idea it would go viral. My father was sorry that they didn’t call with the money and apologised as he would have liked to have thanked them too.’

Last Thursday night Nick, who works as bouncer in Hamlet’s Bar in the Blue Haven Hotel, got a call from his father to say that some drunk lads had been outside his house and one of them fell into a window and smashed it. 

When his father went out to see what happened they had gone, so he couldn’t identify them. Nick helped him secure the window for the night and the following day an envelope was dropped through the letterbox with €200 in it with the words: ‘In Kinsale for weekend. My friend was drunk and fell against your window. Sorry.’

‘The money was more than enough to fix the window and we were lucky we were able to get someone to come out and fit a new window on St Patrick’s Day and we actually got extra strong glass for the window and we’re giving the remainder of the money to charity,’ explained Nick.

‘It was a nice thing to do for them to drop the money through the door and we thought an acknowledgement would be nice,’ he said.

 ‘It’s pretty unusual. It did restore my faith in people,’ he added.