An Irish bachelor party celebrated at a bar in Prague while wearing masks with the face of Hitler. Photo: Heinrich Hoffman via Wikimedia Commons.

Participants in an Irish bachelor party donned Hitler masks and verbally abused locals who confronted them just feet away from the Jewish Quarter in Prague, the Irish Mirror reported on Friday.

The incident occurred on April 24 when a group of 25 to 30 men from the Irish city of Cork gathered at the patio of a bar in the Czech capital, said pub owner Frank Haughton. He said the revelers harangued people who approached them about the inappropriate masks, saying “we can do whatever we want.” The rowdy group also groped Haughton’s female staff and made sexually offensive comments.

“They were a disgrace to themselves, their families, and a huge embarrassment to Ireland,” he told the Irish Examiner. “The sad part is that these guys were of mixed ages, some of whom should have known better. But their language, their inability to have any respect for anything, was repulsive.  These guys just didn’t give a damn.”

Haughton called out the group of men for their insensitivity, abuse of “quiet elderly customers” — who pointed out that wearing the Hitler masks was shameful — and “vulgar treatment of waitresses as sex objects.” He said that he had hosted several bachelor parties in his venues over the last 22 years but none were as “truly repulsive” as this group and the men should be “absolutely ashamed of their behavior.”

“There are two in the ‘truly repulsive’ category that really stand out and it is with sadness and shame that I must state that both came from Ireland,” he added.

Haughton said the group were asked to leave after the bar manager stopped serving them. He has since hired full-time weekend security, the Irish Mirror reported.

The father-of-the-bride defended his future son-in-law’s actions, saying the group of men were too young to understand why a Hitler mask could be offensive.

“There is no malice in them, there’s no harm. They went away for a nice time. You can’t control all the people there,” he said on a radio station in Cork. “[My future son-in-law] is a lovely guy and he’s quiet. You wouldn’t hear him behind a paper bag.”

He added, “A lot of them are in their 20s and their 30s – they probably hadn’t a clue what was going on in World War II, they probably didn’t know it was the former [Czechoslovakia].”

The man said that if he had been at the bachelor party, he would have stopped the group’s “very, very inappropriate” behavior. He admitted that his daughter doesn’t know about the incident and that he would be angry if he were to see her treated like the bar’s waitresses. In the end, however, the father-of-the-bride called the group “a very decent bunch of guys” and claimed that they later apologized for their actions.

“What they did was inappropriate but when they found out what happened they apologized, now, who they apologized to I just don’t know.”