''One Cigarette is the Price of Oral Sex in UCD''

It's news to me, but according to the Sunday Independent's front page banner headline, Irish students are ''Sex mad, booze mad and cocaine mad'', to the extent that they will exchange a cigarette for oral sex. As a story, it fits neatly with their editorial policy of publishing tawdry, sensationalistic, offensive and misleading stories. (Remember Liam Lawlor dying in a car with a prostitute that was, in fact, a translator?)

My favourite part reads as follows:

Derek Freedman, a leading specialist in STI treatment, said recently that he sees in his Dublin clinic a steady stream of UCD students, with many boasting they have had as many as 20 sexual partners, and often unprotected.

Aside from '', and often unprotected'' being the product of diuretic sub-editing, the content seems a little... unbelievable to say the least. It's notable that the ''boasts'' are not a quote from Dr. Freedman, and it doesn't sound like something a doctor would say, even if it were true. Moreover, can you really imagine somebody walking into a clinic and effectively declaring ''look at me, I had enough unprotected sex and got gonorrhea, I'm amazing!!!''. In the history of boasts about sexual bravado, that one doesn't rank so highly in the memorable quotes chapter. Never mind that the average lifetime sexual partners in Ireland is 10.6 making 15-20+ in your early twenties a very obvious exception to normal student (or adult) sexual activity. But ignore that, it doesn't fit with the story! Where's the sensation in that!

As for the ''One Cigarette is the Price of Oral Sex in UCD'' (the other part of the headline), it turns out that's something that happened, once, outside the ''notorious'' student bar in UCD. Those first year students who ran out and bought a pack of 20 for €5 thinking it represented pretty good value might find themselves a little disappointed.