Killybegs publicans plan an initiative to tackle underage drinking, after parents held public meetings about the problem.
Every pub owner in the Co Donegal seaside town has got involved in the scheme where parents are invited to submit details of their teenagers' names and ages to counteract the widespread use of false ID cards.
Advertisements were placed in the local paper before Christmas with a form for parents to fill, and the details will be circulated among all publicans in the area.
The public meetings were attended by publicans and Garda representatives. A Concerned Parents' committee member, Ms Marian Murrin, said the problem had reached a serious level, although probably not worse than elsewhere.
"It started because we had a few young people who ended up in Letterkenny General Hospital being pumped out because they drank concentrated amounts of alcohol. They were aged 15 to 17 but we would be aware that there are kids in the town drinking from the age of 12 or 13," she said.
Publicans say the initiative will help them to know the age of young people coming in. "They come in and show an ID and you have to take it at face value," said publican Mr J. P. McGuinness.
"At least if we have lists from the parents who are concerned that their kids might be drinking, we can check immediately if it is a false ID," he added.
Mr McGuinness said they were told at a public meeting that gardai had received only about five or six applications in the Killybegs area for official ID cards.
It was also accepted that youngsters were getting drink from sources other than public houses. Ms Murrin said in some cases children had taken a small amount of alcohol from each of their homes and mixed it later. Younger children also often get older ones to buy drink for them, she said.
The spokesman for the publicans, Mr Noel Cunningham, said the advantage of being in a town the size of Killybegs was that the names of the young people were generally known.
The aim was to get everybody, parents, publicans and the Garda, to take responsibility for the problem. "It is easy for people to sit at home and blame somebody else, but at the end of the day if you have a 14- or 15-year-old, you have to know where they are at three o'clock in the morning," he said.