The sober truth: Drink isn’t part of our night out — it is the night out

SO, how long did you last? Too often, we drink ourselves silly over Christmas promising that January is going to be different. As we cheerily glug it back all through December, New Year’s Day looms, symbolising enforced abstinence and a return to purity. For a few weeks at least, the weight of our sinfulness will be lifted.

That’s the idea anyway, but chances are if you were promising your body a rest, you broke your pledge a couple of weeks ago. One wasn’t going to harm you, was it? And you’re quite right: one, two — even three or four sometimes — isn’t going to hurt you very much.

At the same time, making the ‘January detox’ resolution is no answer if you spend 11 months of the year overdoing it. Why disallow yourself on January 1 something which simply heightens the joy of everyday life? Why not pledge instead to be measured and rational over the years to come, and avoid having to pay any kind of penance for your understandable lack of willpower?

At this point, a few readers who have had the misfortune of my company when I’ve had a glass too many will complain that I’m being a prig. But Plato said moderation has its foundation in self-acquaintance. I know I’ve had too many, too often.

There’s a lot of concern at the moment about young people’s drinking habits in particular, but the chronic health problems caused by heavy drinking have become muddled with the acute health problems associated with binge drinking — and this, in turn, has become mixed up with tendentious and highly political arguments about licensing hours, the price of alcohol in supermarkets and promotions in pubs. Meanwhile, the differences between the heavy drinker, the binge drinker, and the alcoholic are unclear to most of us.

Actually, I tend to think I drank more sensibly in my younger days — ironically, the days when I really did get smashed. The great thing about getting completely wasted is that you get an almighty hangover the next morning. (If you don’t, you should really start to worry).

One of the chief benefits of hangovers is that they are humbling, and there is too little of that around. Some of you could tell me about young drinkers who are busy ruining their lives. I take your point, and know alcohol for some people is a prison.

But, by and large, we do — over a period of years perhaps — learn from those hangovers.

It’s also a bit sad if you don’t do some silly things on drink when you’re young, as long as there’s no lasting harm done. (Driving, for instance, doesn’t count as a silly thing when you’re drunk: it’s an insane and criminal thing). The general point still stands: among the greatest of our freedoms is the freedom to enjoy ourselves and take our own chances.

And that goes for people of all backgrounds. Too much of the debate about alcohol consumption is actually a sly means for middle-class people to disparage working-class people.

There’s more and more evidence emerging that middle-class people, far from knowing how to behave and how to control their drinking, actually drink more than the lower orders they not-so-secretly despise.

The difference between social and anti-social drinking is often a matter of perspective, and nothing to do with the amount of drink taken, rubbish talked, or offence caused.

The bottom line is the bottom line, though. Whether it’s three glasses too many in a chic wine bar or half a bottle of vodka in the local park with your mates when you’re 16, we are all drinking too much. The guidelines might be arbitrary — about 10 pints of beer a week for men and seven large glasses of wine for women — but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

It might be sexist to suggest men drink beer and women drink wine, but it does bring me to one of the startling statistics that emerges from the figures. Wine sales over the last 20 years in Ireland have gone up by more than 500%.

Of course, men drink wine, too, but sales of none of the categories of alcohol have fallen — far from it. And since women have hardly shifted en masse from drinking Guinness in the mid-’80s to drinking wine today, it would seem that while men’s drinking is increasing, women’s drinking is skyrocketing.

Unlike French and Italian women — for whom drink is an enjoyable accompaniment to food, not a wild libertarian statement — Irish women feel pressured by the gender war into outdoing men.

So it’s all very well talking about a new café-style culture where we all sit around like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir drinking slowly and moderately as we contemplate philosophical questions — but Ireland couldn’t have a continental approach to licensing laws until we, men and women, have a continental approach to drink.

We drink more than anyone except the Luxemburgers (all 10 of them) and, rather oddly, the Hungarians. We drink, on average, about double what the Italians or the Swedes put away.

The Government has established a new advisory group to examine the law governing the sale and consumption of alcohol. It will look at the increase in the number of supermarkets, convenience stores and petrol stations with off-licences and the issue of below-cost selling of alcohol, among other things. It will also examine special exemption orders permitting longer opening hours by pubs and clubs.

But it’s unlikely that more off-licences and longer hours are the problem, or even most of the problem. HSE figures suggest that our love of the demon drink predates these phenomena.

IT’S TRUE that alcohol sales are severely restricted in Sweden, for instance, but in Italy you can sink a glass of Chianti at your newsagents when you buy you paper in the morning.

We all know from the experience of prohibition in the States — when consumption actually went up — that legal remedies are poor remedies.

The problem, it seems, is a much deeper, cultural one and it relates to the privileged position of alcohol in Irish society. A drink is not part of a night out: it is the night out. So Fine Gael is quite right to argue that the working group’s remit is far too restrictive. The report — due at the end of March — should be a starting point for a much wider debate rather than an excuse for a quick legislative fix.

It seems to me that so long as our notions about masculinity — and, for women, the extent to which you are ‘liberated’ — are bound up with our ability to hold our beer or wine or whiskey, Ireland will continue to float towards the surface of the EU league table of drunkenness.

It isn’t in any serious dispute that we are drinking more than our parents’ generation and that it is very, very bad for some of us, not good for most of us, and expensive for all of us.

What doesn’t follow from this is that it is necessarily in the gift of government to fix it. The personal really is political and, when it comes to alcohol, the political is almost entirely personal.