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.