Terry Prone: Mopping up problems created by alcohol is not a job for Drinkaware

Drinkaware has launched a new programme for students despite the Taoiseach, the departments of Education and Health, and the HSE saying it shouldn't be in schools

Drinkaware’s plan was to educate children through programmes in schools about healthy, safe ingestion of booze.

I come from a drinks industry family. My grandfather drove a Guinness dray, and for a while led a more exciting life than a Guinness dray driver would normally expect to live. This was because he had a passing resemblance to Michael Collins.

The resemblance would cause the police to lift him off the dray and take him in for questioning, which can’t have been a productive experience for the cops of the day, firstly because he wasn’t Michael Collins and secondly because he was taciturn. You want expansive when you’re interrogating someone, not taciturn.

My mother’s family regarded employment in Guinness' as akin to a benign inheritance, passed from father to son and we all heard, growing up, how what my father described, with curled lip, as “the Guinness paternalism” meant brewery employees at all levels had their health looked after from cradle to grave.

My father believed that, come the revolution, everybody would get cradle-to-grave healthcare. My mother clearly thought paternalism right now was a better deal than waiting for the revolution.

That isn’t the only family connection to alcohol. My generation married into a family of publicans. So, we’re steeped in drink and for the most part, even those of us who are teetotal, take a determinedly positive view of the industry.

Up to the point when someone invented Drinkaware, an organisation that receives most of its funding through donations from the alcohol industry.

Irish Examiner education corespondent Jess Casey broke the story in October of how schools were being urged to avoid sending their teachers to training developed by Drinkaware.

Drinkaware’s plan must have seemed such a wizard wheeze at the time: Get the industry squarely on the side of moderation by — inter alia — going into schools to educate children in their formative years about healthy, safe ingestion of booze.

It would, of course, never predispose children reached in their formative years to liking the idea of alcohol. Perish the thought, and gloss over the near-century-long track record of health education programmes in schools designed to prevent kids from seeing cool things like sex and cigarettes as desirable.

Generation after generation of kids gazed in horror at pictures of rotted lungs and swore they would never, ever light up. And generation after generation got over the initial revulsion, thought that shots of James Dean clutching a cigarette — or his successor stars clutching theirs — represented all they wanted in life and took up smoking. (Or, more recently, vaping.)

The same happened with educational programmes pushing virginity, purity, and sexual abstention at teenagers, seeking to dampen their urge to have a bit of the other. A bit of the other has always tended to win.

But Drinkaware was going to succeed where others had failed. Not pushing abstention, of course. Come on, why would the industry sponsor shoot themselves in the foot?

Drinkaware — set up, you will note, as a national charity — was “working to prevent and reduce alcohol misuse in Ireland”. Its literature mentioned it having “a remit to tackle underage drinking”. A remit meaning, according to Smart Lookup, “the task or area of activity officially assigned to an individual or organisation”. Officially assigned, you got that?

But officially assigned by whom? Well, perhaps by Drinkaware’s board, which includes representatives from one of the big four accountancy firms and a PR agency. No harm to them and I’m sure they are principled idealistic people, but them giving a remit isn’t quite the same as a remit from God or the Department of Health. It’s more like a corporate operational choice.

The thing Drinkaware has going for it is phenomenal governance and procedural precision. It develops training programmes to be delivered in schools and indicates that these programmes are so important — so “evidence-informed” — as to require them to insist that any teacher who wants to deliver such a course must “attend training, to ensure effective delivery”.

Outcomes research

In addition, it commissions independent research into how it’s doing. Not outcomes research, which would establish if its programmes actually reduce the number of under-15s, for example, who launch themselves into alcohol consumption either through first sampling, then watering down the contents of the parental sideboard or by communal hillside consumption of cider.

Research along those lines would validate — or fail to validate — the Drinkaware offering. Even those of us with doubts about the drinks industry owning its own little educational charity would have to say “fair dues” if the end result was less alcohol consumption among teens or a later start on the consumption commitment.

But Drinkaware doesn’t do outcome research. It just asks teens who have been on their programme about their future intentions. Now, here’s the truth of future intentions: They’re optimistic fiction. All of us have a future intention or two and some of us will crystalise ours on New Year’s Day, backsliding by January 6.

Future intentions are not worth researching. They are not data. They prove nothing about the Drinkaware programme other than that kids remembered something from it and decided to suck up a bit in answering the questionnaire.

All of which led to the Alcohol Forum planning, as they put it, to “make some noise” later this week about Drinkaware. They want it to “cease all education in Irish schools” and they want the Government to tell schools that “Drinkaware programmes, materials and teacher training programmes are no longer permitted by those involved in the education of our children.”

They’ll have the WHO’s Professor Tom Babor handy to support their efforts. According to the Alcohol Forum’s Paula Leonard, their campaign focuses on keeping schools-based alcohol education programmes free from alcohol industry funding and influence. Simple as that.

YOU have to hand it to Drinkaware, it weathers opposition well, and it has been getting a lot of it in the last couple of months. Its education programme manager sent a letter a couple of weeks back to principals who have not allowed Drinkaware into their schools, the writer saying she wanted to clarify disinformation (unspecified) in media.

“The matter of our funding was raised in the recent coverage,” the letter goes on, “but failed to recognise that those who fund Drinkaware’s work in no way influence our work.”

Now, that’s not a clarification. That’s just an assertion. It was never believable and it’s believed less and less as time goes on. No insult to the people employed by Drinkaware. It’s not them, but the basic premise that’s incredible.

Recent weeks have seen the Taoiseach, the departments of Education and Health, and the HSE all saying Drinkaware shouldn’t be in schools. Undeterred, Drinkaware has launched a new programme for transition year students.

It needs to be stopped. If the drinks industry wants to help mop up some of the problems misuse of alcohol creates, the industry has lots of options. Drinkaware shouldn’t be one of them.