Alcohol and the Irish - Why can we not drink responsibly?

Alcohol has done more damage to this society, and continues to do so, than any other phenomenon in our history.

It has caused myriad road deaths and is the catalyst for suicide and so many bewildering cases of depression.

It has destroyed more lives, sundered more families, bankrupt more businesses and devastated more relationships than is comprehensible or acceptable.

In just the last week, courtesy of RTÉ’s Prime Time, we saw scenes of casual street violence, degradation, and the absolute absence of restraint or self-respect. Last week, too, the Circuit Criminal Court in Cork heard the heart-rending victim impact statement from the mother of a young man who lost his life in a drink-related car crash. She and her distraught family are just one of thousands of people in the same position — ordinary people trying to recover some sort of equilibrium after the needless death of a loved one through a mindless drink-related tragedy.

This is not a new problem — it is nearly 200 years since Fr Theobald Mathew began his temperance campaign by establishing the Cork Total Abstinence Society in Apr 1838.

Today the focus has fallen on the role drink advertising and sponsorship plays in encouraging and sustaining alcohol abuse.

Banning tobacco advertising may not have had the great beneficial impact that its advocates anticipated. About 6,000 people still die every year from smoking-related illnesses. Recent Eurostat figures record that there are still 1,426,000 smokers in Ireland. That is 31% of the population. It is hard to say that ending drink marketing would be any more successful. There is, however, a pressing need to confront alcohol abuse.

Below-cost selling should be banned. Supermarkets and off-licences that sell drink to minors should face convincing penalties: The loss of their group’s — not just the offending branch — drinks licence for a year say.

The sale of spirits in bottles containing less than 700ml should be banned. After all, a previous government made it illegal to sell cigarettes in packets of less than 20. Why not do the same for spirits? A national identity card would be a useful tool in this campaign.

However, the most important element of any campaign centres on personal responsibility or, in the case of underage drinking, parental responsibility.

One way to insist on this would be by charging anyone using a hospital accident and emergency service because of their own drinking the full price of treatment. In the case of minors, parents would be billed. That would change behaviour if a night out might cost say, €2,000.

Earlier this month, the national substance misuse strategy was launched but the Government have not given it the kind of endorsement needed for success. Some ministers have rightly identified the positive role played by drinks sponsorship in the arts and sport, and the challenge must be to secure that funding while also changing the self-destructive habits of the significant minority who habitually abuse alcohol. The scale of this challenge cannot be underestimated, especially in a country where the legislature is one of the very few places of employment with an in-house, private bar.

There is, too, a nagging feeling that we can change the rules all we like but this cancer will persist until we resolve the far harder dilemma — what is it in our national character, our psyche, that makes us so susceptible, so enthusiastic and blinkered about drink, especially binge drinking?