Coalition criticised for lack of alcohol action
Shane Butler said the Government’s 2013 action plan on alcohol was more a “political sop” to public-health experts than an effective policy response and said he was concerned new laws may not be enacted before the next election.
An associate professor at Trinity College Dublin, Dr Butler said Health Minister Leo Varadkar’s decision to shelve plans to phase out sports sponsorship by the alcohol industry was a “political” decision and not, as the minister had claimed, based on the evidence.
Dr Butler, who has researched and written about alcohol policy for decades, said there was “little reason to believe” that much has changed in political terms since 1996, when the Department of Health published National Alcohol Policy — Ireland, and the government abandoned it.
“It seems that while successive Irish governments have paid lip service to the views of public-health experts, they have not ultimately been persuaded that implementation of alcohol policies based upon such views would command sufficient popular support or deliver such unequivocally positive outcomes as to justify their adoption,” he said.
He told the Irish Examiner that it “doesn’t matter which parties are in government”, as politicians do not think there is “grassroots support” for tackling the issue of alcohol.
In a paper published in the journal Contemporary Drug Problems, Dr Butler said the National Alcohol Policy was a “really well-presented document” but that it “broke down” because the Government failed to implement the actions recommended.
He said departments were like independent “silos”, each with their own priorities and values which they put above the greater public good articulated in reports.
This was repeated with the strategic taskforce on alcohol in 2002 and, most recently, with the steering group’s report on a national substance misuse strategy, which published its report in early 2012. That group called for a range of actions, including the phasing out of sports sponsorship, restrictions on advertising, a social responsibility levy on the industry, structural separation of alcohol from other goods in shops, and minimum unit pricing.
The sponsorship proposal was abandoned, the levy dropped, and structural separation put on a trial basis.
Dr Butler said that the Government deemed the sponsorship ban “politically unacceptable” and the levy a “non-runner”, while it “deferred” the structural separation.
He said it was “largely dispiriting from a health promotional perspective” to see the lack of support the Department of Health received from other departments in addressing alcohol misuse.
He said governments have “dismantled” cross-department management structures that could drive through reforms and that, in 2014, the substance misuse area was left without a junior minister for the first time in 20 years.
“There is little reason to believe, therefore, that in political terms much has changed since the Department of Health published National Alcohol Policy.”
He said the key proposal the Government has accepted from the experts — minimum pricing — was held up, pending a legal challenge by the industry.
