Drink and be damned

national | miscellaneous | news report Tuesday December 10, 2002 16:16 by B. Ronan

Drinking and Ireland, what have we become

Drink and be Merry

The Mafioso Italians, the extremist Arabs, the sex crazed Swedes and the dirty travellers, stereotypes that demeans people as badly as it represents them We educate our children not to believe them and we condescend those who advocate them. In spite of this, recent revelations on RTE’s current events show “Prime Time” demonstrates that we live one.
The Drunken Irish, a shadow that follows us around the world has proven itself true. Our culture is steeped in drink, our bus stops advertise it our school kids buy it. Is this the reality of post “Celtic Tiger” Ireland? Unfortunately yes, but where did all this abuse of the national pass time stem from?
The papers seem to be pointing at alco-pops (small bottles of lemonade laced with spirits) and advertising aimed at teenagers. Some blame the parents; others point to the extra cash that has being floating around for the last ten years or so. I’ve even heard that it’s in our blood.
So lets start with the legal road, where is the national identity card scheme now, how many off-licences and pubs have being closed for serving alcohol to minors, and why are publicans allowed to serve drink to people that can’t even stand up? Well the national ID card idea seems to have faded into the mist, a lucid dream based less in reality than the concept of the Garda asking obviously drunk minors to produce one. Several pubs have being fined or temporally closed for serving minors, at least two in Dublin in the past six months. Publicans usually go to court, pay a fine, about equal to the minors bar tab, and reopen the next weekend.
The government’s solution to our national pathological obsession with alcohol has being a hike in the tax rate. But will this clear our hospitals on Saturday nights, where the majority of patients are suffering from alcohol related ailments, self inflicted or otherwise? We cannot forget the extra cash everyone seems to have these days. Surely the most determined among us can still muster up the 60 Euro it takes to get so smashed that you chalk up a free trolley for the night and the customary stomach pumping that the Matter serves up so well. For these victims of shrewd advertising and bad parenting the problem may be more serious than “one to many”. The taboo word, only whispered in good company, Alcoholic springs to mind, and Mr. McCreevy can tax alco-pops until Jesus can’t even afford to turn water into wine, but they will still wake up with the usual “Good Morning Doctor”.
As we blame the Celtic Tiger for giving us the opportunity to stupefy ourselves every weekend the facts take a turn for the worst. The consumption of alcohol has increased in most areas of society, but the lower end of the scale, those who benefited least from the 1990’s have the largest increase in consumption of alcohol. Yes, you remember the people on social welfare, the people who didn’t get an extra farthing while the rest of us got SSIA accounts? It would seem that the governments plan to stop us from drinking by making it to expensive will only serve to fund our SSIA accounts with tax money paid by the most vulnerable and isolated in society.
Soon enough we won’t be able to afford our stereotype and will have to go back to the older image of tramps sitting on park benches drinking obscure liquors from brown paper bags. Cause if the tax just goes up and the poor just get poorer the alcohol problem will never be solved.