Children pay price for our drink culture

THE three children who spent the first night of their summer holidays in a Portuguese children’s home are the latest public victims of the Irish and British binge drinking culture.

Those three little kids can now be put in a multi-media gallery along with the ubiquitous shots of pretty waifs, in itsy-bitsy dresses, passed out in shop fronts and the stomach-wrenching televisions ads which force us to confront the consequences of drink driving.

Every night in every city, town and village across these isles there are tens of thousands more children whose needs are relegated behind their parents’ urge to drink. Most parents don’t think of it in such black and white terms. Deep down, we Irish ‘kind of’ think we have a right to drink.

You have a good day in work: you get pissed to celebrate. You have a bad day in work: you drown your sorrows. You win a match, you drink. You lose a match, you drink.

So embedded in the psyche is our right to drink that drink-driving laws (which might just save a few dozen people from being mowed to death by steamed up drivers) are being accused of attacking the rural community.

Publicans love to talk of the effects of these new laws on the rural bachelor who ‘lived’ for a few hours in the local at night.

I’m sorry, but is the Irish rural bachelor incapable of socialising with a cup of tea or a glass of coke? In any other country but here and Britain, elderly men gather to chat on street benches, or play cards around cups of coffee. We mightn’t have the weather for playing boules, but surely our weather doesn’t necessitate that we get blotto because we have to stay indoors more than they do on the Med?

At the extreme end of Irish drinking are the hungry six-year-olds packed off to the local chipper as mum or dad are too wasted to make a proper dinner and, come morning, there are helpless hungry toddlers and babies left sitting in filthy nappies as their parents can’t cope with the ‘grind’ of feeding and changing them.

At the other end is the daddy or mummy who regularly falls in home at 3am on a Sunday and ‘needs to sleep’ until the following lunchtime.

Family plans for Sunday go out the window as ‘Daddy needs to rest’.

They are not taking due care of their children and are putting drinking before their kids’ needs. Their drinking is affecting their family and that’s one of the signs of alcoholism.

When young children are running around a pub at 5pm on a Sunday evening, their sozzled parents lining up another round, you’ll see the neighbours tut tutting, but as the child of any Irish alcoholic will tell you, nobody intervenes or yells ‘stop’.

We Irish love to feel smug about ourselves and superior to others, but as a society we’ve enabled the kind of behaviour which saw the McGuckian kids crying in the lobby of a Portuguese hotel.

I hope that for the McGuckian kids’ sake that this was a one-off incident, but my instincts tell me it can’t be.

Spanish and Italian bars are open to children until the early hours because their parents won’t lose the run of themselves as the beer is cheap. They drink while enjoying themselves.

They don’t have to drink to enjoy themselves.