I HAPPENED to be in town on Thursday night last and I must say I was amazed by what I saw – or, rather, what I didn’t see. The place was like a ghost town. And you would have to feel for those in business.

Once upon a time, the town was buzzing every Thursday night. It didn’t matter whether it was winter or summer, whether kids were going back to school or not, people still had a few bob in their pocket for a little bit of entertainment. Now, it appears, everyone is skint.

When this town was booming, it was no big deal for several thousand people to be socialising in the pubs and nightclubs on a Thursday night – with practically every one of those people back again on either Friday or Saturday night. And as for Sundays, there was a time in the late ’70s and ’80s – when the pubs closed at 10pm – that hotel nightclubs were literally bounding, as people waited for the bars to reopen just after midnight.

But that was in the day when the town just didn’t rely on a few employers to provide all of the jobs. You could take your pick of several businesses that employed 150 people or more. Then there were those with 300-plus, 500-plus and, as we all remember, there was once a time when Braun hit an all-time-high of over 1,700 people. They were great days to be in business in Carlow. Practically all of the shops in town, no matter what they sold, were doing a lively trade.

All that was a far cry from what I saw on Thursday last. It was difficult to differentiate between those businesses which had just closed up for the night or those who had finally given up and closed down altogether.

Granted, the college students hadn’t returned at that stage – but as a few people in the entertainment business said to me, that wouldn’t make a whole lot of difference to them. The reality today is that students do most of their entertaining in whatever apartment complex or house they are staying in. They only go out for the last hour or so and spend very little when they do. To them, understandably enough, it is all about value for money, and they can buy alcohol a lot cheaper in a supermarket than in a pub or nightclub.

But there is more to the life of a town than a nightclub. All the pubs I looked into were practically deserted, restaurants were closed shortly after 10pm and all the takeaways were empty. Naturally, there wasn’t a shop open anywhere.

People were complaining recently that Brown Thomas had opened its Christmas shop in August – but can you really blame them? For retailers to capitalise on any Christmas trade, they are being forced to pick up scraps along the way and then hope there will be a final mad rush in the last few weeks before 25 December.

There has been a lot of talk recently about the banks being open for business, green shoots sprouting up all over the place and the number of jobs being created. All that might sound well, but the reality, as of last Thursday night, was totally different.

Unfortunately, we still have a long, long way to go.