Minimum alcohol pricing will only target cheap drink in off-licences
The Bill contains positive and critical actions to reduce alcohol harm and improve our health, safety and wellbeing. Most importantly, evidence shows that this legislation and its inclusion of three key areas — alcohol pricing, marketing and availability — can save lives. Despite this, we know the Bill will come under sustained attack from the alcohol industry.
This is because we cannot reduce alcohol harm without reducing our high levels of consumption, which the alcohol industry continuously seeks to increase. Our alcohol consumption, which increased last year, is now two litres of pure alcohol per person above the Healthy Ireland target (and OECD average) of 9.1 litres per capita and we have one of the highest rates of binge drinking in the world.
The World Health Organisation has stated that “the alcohol industry has no role in the formulation of alcohol policies”. The position of the HSE is “there is an inherent conflict associated with the alcohol industry playing a role in providing public health advice”.
The Bill contains a wide range of measures that protect Irish children and reduce harmful drinking. One of its key measures, minimum unit pricing (MUP), has already been distorted and cast as a measure that will affect all drinkers. In fact, it is a targeted measure that will affect only the strongest, cheapest drink in the off-trade, which is consumed mainly by the youngest and most harmful drinkers.
MUP will have absolutely no impact on the price of a pint, or any alcohol sold in pubs, clubs or restaurants. When introduced in Canada, it led to an immediate reduction in deaths due to alcohol, as well as reducing the burden of alcohol-related hospital admissions and alcohol-fuelled crime.
We urge everyone to support this Bill so that it can be the tipping point for major cultural change in Ireland’s harmful drinking habits.
It will be life-changing for future and present generations and reduce the harm and deaths caused by alcohol, and the suffering and grief borne by far too many Irish men, women and children.
