Medical lobby’s drink stance ‘nonsense’

Jimmy Woulfe, Mid-West Correspondent

The commission’s recommendation that cafe bars be licensed to sell drink was dropped by the Justice Minister after intense lobbying.

Gordon Holmes, in his first comment on the controversy, said there was a lot of misinformation about their proposal for cafe bars.

Mr Holmes said: “Statistics can be produced saying the more drinking outlets you have the higher the population of drinkers you will have. But this cannot be valid in a country where you already have enough, if not too many, outlets. The drinking public would not increase if you opened cafe bars, but they would have different places to go drinking in a different environment.”

He said he could understand publicans’ objections.

“But,” he said, “the one thing I could not understand was the medical profession’s opposition. Their objection seemed to be based on the theory that if you had more outlets you would have more drinkers. I think in Ireland that is absolute nonsense, as you already have too many outlets. I don’t think one more person would drink if we had cafe bars. You are just moving the drinking public into a different drinking environment, an environment where they are likely to drink less.”

He said all the commission was trying to do was open up continental cafe bar-type outlets. He said medical opponents produced Scandinavian statistics, which were not relevant to this country.

Mr Holmes also criticised the Department of Health for not initiating an anti-binge drinking campaign. “When that awful tragedy happened outside Anabels nightclub in Dublin when one young man lost his life and others had their lives ruined, out of what appeared to be a drunken brawl, that was an opportunity for an advertising campaign pointing out the evils of drink. But nobody did it.”

He said he would like to see the department now initiating such a campaign on the evils of drink.

A spokesperson for the Irish Medical Organisation (IMO) said they stood over their opposition to the proposed increase in licences. This was based on the huge feedback they had got from their members throughout the country about fears of increased drinking.