Minister should learn from ban on smoking when tackling drink crisis
It will just swell the exchequer, giving the Government more money to waste.
There was the same reaction recently when it was announced that vodka in sachets was to be released on an already soaked (in both senses of the word) drinking public, especially the young public.
To even the most naive among us, it is quite obvious that making alcohol available in sachets (that can be sneaked in anywhere) is anything but a good idea. The most practical approach would have been to ban it from sale.
The same should apply to any new product which can add to the problem of binge and underage drinking. If a ban on smoking could be introduced, the same should apply to alcoholic drinks that have the potential to aggravate an already extremely serious problem. Instead, the Government’s reaction was to suggest that it would be subject to enough tax to make even Matt Talbot blush.
According to the report from the Strategic Task Force on Alcohol, the cost to the country of binge drinking is €2.6 billion. This arises from costs to healthcare; road accidents, alcohol-related crime; absenteeism and tax lost because of that, and alcohol-related social welfare payments.
The good news, this report pointed out, was that last year there was a 6% decline in the consumption of alcohol - the first in 16 years - and it was attributable to the increase in taxes on cider, spirits and alcohol pops in the Budget of 2002.
The bad news, however, was that despite this reduction in consumption last year, Irish people remain the highest consumers of alcohol in Europe, with each adult drinking the equivalent of 13.5 litres of pure alcohol.
Commendably, the report recommends reducing this to nine litres, and further recommends that this be achieved by higher taxes!
We will soon reach a point where taxes from drink will wipe out the national debt, if we still have one.
Minister for Health Mícheál Martin, at the launch of the report, said that there was no doubt that alcohol-related harm was one of the biggest public health issues facing Ireland today from an economic, social and personal standpoint.
“This harm is not limited to the individual drinker but also to those around them and to society. This wide-ranging report, which I will be bringing to Government, contains recommendations relevant to many different sectors in Irish life.”
This is, nearly word-for-word, what he said about smoking.
Like passive smoke, serious drinking can affect others, and is one of the biggest public health issues facing the country. Yet the minister knows, as we all do, that there are specific alcoholic drinks which contribute to a huge degree to the problem of binge drinking, and it’s not pints of stout.
Nobody would suggest that smoking contributed to road accidents, crime or affect social welfare payments. Yet it has been banned.
No such attack on alcohol.
The report also points out that alcohol is estimated to be involved in 40% of all road deaths and 37% of all drownings. For young men, alcohol is reported to be behind the deaths of 25% of all male deaths between the ages of 15 and 29 years of age.
Coincidentally, the Government was due to hold what was billed as a summit over road deaths yesterday.
It was to have the collective wisdom of the Minister for Transport, Séamus Brennan; the Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell, and Garda Commissioner Noel Conroy.
Representatives from the National Roads Authority and the National Safety Council were also to attended.
You would imagine that they were going to produce some magic formula to reduce the number of deaths on our roads, but the Government has never done the most obvious thing, such as putting in place an adequate traffic corps.
That is not to suggest that the members of the present traffic corps are inept, there just aren’t enough of them with sufficient resources to properly patrol and control our roads.
IN THE meantime, the death toll on the roads continues to mount and so far this year it stands at 275, which is 41 more dead people than the same period last year.
Perversely, this affords Mr Brennan some kind of macabre comfort, pointing out that the number of people dying on Irish roads was still down when compared to the years before the penalty points system.
Such statistical correctness is cold comfort for the victims and their families who had the cheek to distort the impact of the penalty points system.
Probably to be trotted out again will be those phantom 2,000 gardaí promised before the last general election, but which failed to materialise.
For a figment of the imagination, this posse of ghosts has performed above and beyond the call of duty for the Government. In the first instance, they helped Fianna Fáil and the PDs regain power and they haven’t cost a bob. Now, they have been wheeled in again (or at least promised again) in connection with a revamped traffic corps.
They will, appropriately, probably be Mr Brennan’s answer to solving the problem of the number of single-car crashes during the early hours of the morning at the weekends.
Talking about ghosts brings to mind how €2.3 billion of European taxpayers’ money has been spirited away to help the needy and indigent farmers in the Union.
Normally, we don’t mind helping out the farmers with their monthly - or is it daily? - cheques from Brussels, but they were not entitled to this particular €2.3 billion.
So vast is the fund for the Common Agricultural Policy that nobody noticed the farmers had been paid this bonus which they weren’t entitled to over and above the €44 billion they get paid annually.
Trying to get it back is proving to be difficult, and so far it has taken 31 years to get back about 17%. Between 1971 and 2002, €3 billion was paid out to the farmers by mistake, and only a fraction has been recovered or accounted for.
It’s a wonder Irish farmers weren’t demanding parity in this divvy out, because they only got €38 million, in comparison to the €1.73 billion the Italians got, or the £83 million the Brits got.
To date, just over half has been recovered from Ireland and 40% from Britain and only 10% from the Italians. The balance will be recovered about the same year as the Irish reach the nine litres of alcohol intake recommend by the task force.
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