One way to tackle the binge drinking culture
Your own Fergus Finlay is the latest (Irish Examiner, June 23).
He cites a taskforce report urging that government policy “should be aimed at restricting any further increase in the physical availability of alcohol (number of outlets, times of sale).”
Why “any further increase?” If increasing the number of outlets would bring increases in alcoholism and liver cancer rates, surely the logical corollary is that decreasing the number would reduce alcoholism and liver cancer?
Are we not then duty-bound simply to abolish as many existing pub licenses as it takes in order to bring our drinking down to acceptable levels?
Never mind the poor publicans who would be deprived of their livelihood, this is a matter of saving lives.
I am, of course, being facetious, but there is a real point.
We know we cannot infringe on the property rights of publicans even though, if the vintners’ research is correct, it would save lives.
We can, however, infringe the rights of consumers and of those barmen who would like to enter the pub trade by opening their own café bar businesses.
In the past few years many licences have been ‘expunged’ in rural Ireland so as to increase the number of licences in Dublin.
Has anyone detected a fall in alcohol consumption in the areas deprived of a licence?
Has any researcher even looked for such a fall? I doubt it.
Nobody would commission such research since all of us know the answer anyway.
Anyone serious about reducing alcohol consumption would call for an increase in the tax on alcohol - it has actually fallen in percentage terms in the last decade.
This would be far more effective in reducing consumption than maintaining the publicans’ cartel.
Any approach to binge drinking that does not countenance increasing tax on alcohol is just sanctimonious twaddle.
Tim O’Halloran
Ferndale Road
Dublin 11
