Modern rules on office behaviour have turned the annual Christmas party into something “terminally dull”, according to columnist Ian O’Doherty.

With December upon us, the Christmas party season is well and truly under way it is all making the Irish Independent writer nostalgic for wilder times.

“I used to like giving out about the various different Christmas parties you’d have to go to and now I just really miss having Christmas parties to go to,” he told Lunchtime Live. 

“The workplace has become so sanitised, whereas some of the maddest things I ever came across were at Christmas parties.” 

Mr O’Doherty said that, in his experience, the office party used to be a reliable generator of scandal and recalls once finding two managers “in positions that they shouldn’t have been”.

“That just kept the gossip going for the rest of the year,” he said.  

He said his favourite Christmas party memory is probably when his friend ended up in hospital after falling and splitting his head open.

“What I really feel nostalgic about when it comes to the Christmas party is the sense of fun and the sense of joy that we used to have as a people, as a society, that we just don’t have anymore,” he said. 

'A Christmas party has to be full bar’

The columnist said the blame lies squarely at the door of HR (Human Resources) who have regulated the craic out of the event.

“HR came and brought in all these rules of, ‘You can do this, you can do that,’” he said.  

“The last Christmas party I was at, we were given two vouchers each for a drink and I [thought], ‘No, no, a Christmas party has to be full bar’.

"I don’t need somebody called Karen from HR saying, ‘You can have this amount of fun but you can’t have any fun.’

“That’s when I started drifting away from them, even before everything became as terminally dull as they are now.”

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Main image: An office Christmas party. Picture by: Alamy.com