Between the devil and the deep black pint

Even if you’ve been living in a cave for the last year, you’ll have heard the furore over our drinkin’ and fightin’. It’s been relentless. Every dog in the street has an opinion, and well he might. He’s probably been savaged by sozzled sots some soggy, sordid Saturday night.

We’ve got problems. Trouble is, we can’t agree on what they are. Furthermore, we can’t agree on what to do about them. Official Ireland, comprising the health system, the justice system and the media, has one perspective. The drinks industry has another. Somewhere out there, the Ordinary Decent Drinkers of Ireland, or Oddies if you will, have their thoughts as well, but we rarely get to hear those.

But some things are agreed. Our average consumption of alcohol, however you measure it, has risen significantly over the last twenty years. The increase is more dramatic amongst young people, especially women. For example, while our 15-year old males are in fourth place in the European binge league, our 15-year old gals are up on top. Not only that, but Ireland is the only country in Europe where younger women binge as often and as heavily as do their male counterparts.

Underage drinking is also identified as a major problem, with children reporting that they start drinking as young as ten, though admittedly in small numbers.

The other major concern is that this increased drinking is associated, rightly or wrongly, with street violence, domestic violence and breakdown, sexual risk-taking, depression and suicide.

Official Ireland places the blame for all this squarely on the Irish themselves and their historic drinking culture, aided and abetted by a number of critical developments.

These include higher levels of disposable income, increased availability of drink due to longer opening hours and more off-licenses, and the development of ‘drinking factories’ aka superpubs. Particular venom is directed at the drinks industry for its introduction of ‘ready-to-go’ drinks and alcopops, which are seen to target young people, and for its advertising and promotional activities.

In keeping with their modern role as moral arbiters, the media have led the temperance onslaught. Certainly, the alcohol issue has presented plenty of opportunities for riders of high horses. And Saturday night fevers guarantee good photos. But the zeal of the converted is also in play, and more than one guilty conscience is being salved.

More extreme viewpoints shelter behind the official policy line. They include prohibitionists, the addiction-therapy sector and promoters of Christian family values. Some argue that alcohol is a drug and should be treated exactly like tobacco or heroin. Deviation from the official consensus is viewed by some as collusion with drug dealers, even with the devil.

As to responding, Official Ireland has concluded that urgent and extreme treatment is required if the patient is to survive. Proposals include making alcohol prohibitively expensive (as though it isn’t that already), restricting its availability by closing pubs and off-licenses or shortening opening hours, banning advertising of alcohol and printing warnings on alcohol containers. Education gets relatively short shrift.

On the public order front, the Minister for Justice has signalled draconian new measures, new kinds of licences and ‘massively strengthening Garda powers’ to enforce the law.

In all this, there has been little attempt at establishing consensus. Instead we are invited to adopt proposals agreed in conclave. Or perhaps it’s that the word consultation means something very different in the medical world to what it means elsewhere.

Dissent has largely been left to alcohol manufacturers and pub owners and a handful of journalists. But there are other dissidents. They include parents, teachers and youth leaders. Many are as critical of the industry as they are of the official analyses. But their views are largely isolated in what is an increasingly polarised debate. There is also disagreement – club owners are critical of the change brought about by pubs remaining open until the early morning.

Among the general arguments advanced are that the Irish are no different to other Northern European countries, as a visit to any Nordic city reveals; that demographic factors are at work; that the majority don’t drink either excessively or dangerously; that young people and especially children are themselves sidelined to learn their drinking and sexual behaviours in the company of peers because there’s nowhere else for them to go. It is also suggested that increased drinking is closely linked to the more hedonistic youth culture ushered in about ten years ago.

As to the culture of the pub and the craic, it’s there. We’ve even used it to sell our tourist traps. And it’s real. We’ll see each other ‘for a few pints’. And there’s still widespread acceptance of a person being ‘a bit under the weather’. Having a late morning after ‘a bit of a session’ is regarded as quite normal. In truth, many of us have been that soldier. Alcohol is central to celebration, to social intercourse. But is this a bad thing? Surely not, unless a person habitually becomes a danger to self or others.

That said, observers rightly contrast our drinking culture with the Mediterranean area. Alcohol is much cheaper there, much more accessible and yet the kind of drunkenness we see here is conspicuous by its absence, except in those towns colonised by north European clubbers.

Alcohol is associated with food in Mediterranean Europe, with social gathering, with family and friends. People don’t drink to get drunk. Drunks are generally pitied and public drunkenness is frowned upon. Young people flock together as a matter of course, often in their hundreds, drinking Cokes and coffees, and hanging out. That’s all. They will even return with their families and friends for the passagiata – hundreds of people of all ages eating ice creams and promenading, without the slightest sense of disorder.

The contrast with Ireland is stark. For all the lip-service to the family in Ireland, our society is largely unfriendly to kids. Ask any skater. Ask the kids hanging out around the Central Bank in Dublin.

Consequently, most young people’s early engagement with alcohol, and sexuality in turn, is covert, uncontrolled, peer-guided and excessive by definition. As to how they get their jar, off-licences can be conned, as can pubs. But there’s also so-called tailgate sales – individuals with vans buying to order and supplying teenagers in fields and schoolyards, all well away from any hint of moderating influence.

Their first lessons in drinking may come from watching adults, but their apprenticeships are served in the company of older teenagers, in fields and lanes and school playgrounds.

It’s significant. Some people argue that the earlier a child starts to drink, the more likely s/he is to have a problem with alcohol. But actually, as research in the UK shows, it’s the age at which she or he begins to drink unsupervised that’s decisive.

The truth is, while Michael McDowell’s proposals for ‘cafè-style bars’ has merit, far from banning teenagers from entering, they should be encouraged into them, to learn to deal with alcohol as a normal part of life and not a gateway to narcosis.

Turning to the demographic question, much is made of the statistic that our consumption of alcohol has increased by 41% since the mid-1980s, while that of our counterparts in Europe and elsewhere has declined. This is true as far as it goes, but it fails to take account of a number of key variables.

One of these is the change in our population over time. We have had enormous movements of population over that period. In the late 80s the equivalent of the population of Cork emigrated and then returned in the mid-90s.

Look at the figures. The number of people aged 15-35, the highest drinking group, increased in Ireland by almost 20% between 1991 and 2001. In Sweden, it declined by just under 10% in the same period. It’s hardly surprising that alcohol consumption has begun to decline in Sweden. The wonder is that it hasn’t decreased more. Now, this doesn’t entirely explain the increase in consumption here, but it certainly puts the changes relative to other European countries in perspective.

Particular emphasis is placed on the role of advertising and promotion in Ireland’s alcohol ‘problem’. Astonishingly, little has been heard from the advertising industry on this. Actually, there is a body of international research showing that advertising is a great deal less significant than peer influences, that is, youth culture, and that its role is to draw people to particular brands.

A good example of this is the Carlsberg nightclub ad, recently criticised by Michael McDowell. What he saw there – drink associated with sexual success – is at odds with what most young men see. They know that those three losers would never get into a nightclub full of grooving models. That’s the whole point of the ad – Carlsberg saying to these guys, ‘we know you have a fantasy, and we can’t fulfil it for you – all we can give you is a good pint...and a taxi home’.

As it happens, a great deal of the drink advertising we see on Irish television is on UK channels, as is also the case with those appalling real-life programmes that follow British bimbos and himbos around warm places as they try to get drunk and laid.

We live in an open culture, one in which most of our cultural messages come from outside. Attempting to ban advertising in the absence of a similar ban in the UK would simply hamstring Irish media. Or is it envisaged that a new corps of censors will be employed to scissors out ads for alcohol from imported newspapers and magazines? Surely not.

As for sponsorships, Guinness’s support for the All-Ireland hurling and Heineken’s support for the European Rugby Cup have been enormously beneficial, both for the sports and the standard of play. And actually, they have also influenced many people to go to games, and to play a bit as well.

Instead of banning advertising, wouldn’t it be better to agree a surcharge on advertising expenditure – say 5% - that could be spent on an advertising campaign promoting responsible drinking?

This has happened in the UK, with one especially striking ad – ‘Everybody can enjoy a drink; nobody enjoys a drunk’ – based on Prodigy’s video for ‘Smack My Bitch Up’. I’ve seen it on ITV, but not anywhere else. But like some of the motor safety ads, once you see it you won’t forget it.

A similar lead has been established by the campaign on tobacco in Ireland. Log on to the hotpress web-site, and there it is – ‘who wants to be a loser?’ Well, who does? This is kind of approach works.

Clearly, someone has an eye on the street. But too many of the national playmakers don’t. If they did, they’d have been aware of the changes in drug use that are so catastrophically changing behaviour in pubs, clubs and most obviously in the streets, as Mark Kavanagh pointed out last issue.

Those who are aware of these things, and they include researchers, Gardaí and members of Drugs Task Forces, are heard to murmur politically unthinkable things, like that cannabis should be deregulated, and that this of itself would ease late night street violence. Others have suggested a drinking licence, like a driver’s licence, complete with provisional status and penalty points system.

Who knows? But we need to think outside the box. What has failed elsewhere is unlikely to succeed here. You can’t make people change - they have to do that themselves. It isn’t easy. Influencing long-established and deeply ingrained behaviour involves hard yards. The objective is not to stop people drinking, it’s to promote responsible and healthy drinking, to encourage use instead of abuse.

Cheers.

DRINK: THE NEW FORBIDDEN FRUIT

It’s interesting to contrast the way Official Ireland views alcohol abuse today with how it viewed sexual misbehaviour in the 1930s. In those days, you could drink as you liked. Indeed, drunkenness excused almost all bad behaviour. But parish priests, armed with blackthorn sticks, roamed country lanes looking for anyone engaged in any kind of sexual activity.

Now the tables are turned. The parish priest’s power is gone and anything goes in sexual matters, except sex with children or animals. Not only that, but you can go on the radio, or into print to ‘celebrate’ it. But by the looks of things, drunkenness is the great new forbidden and any day now we’ll have vigilantes prowling the lanes and fields looking for young people engaged in drinking...

You might say that in 21st century Ireland, public drinking has become the new unlawful carnal knowledge.

SWEDE DREAMS ARE NOT MADE OF THIS

They lurched down the street, wrapped in their flags, their football shirts flapping about their arses. One stopped to relieve himself in a lane. The others shambled and scrambled on, shouting and cursing. They were big and beefy and boisterous.

It was so like an English stag party in Temple Bar that I had to pinch myself. But it wasn’t. It was in Helsingør, a seaport in Denmark, better known perhaps as Elsinore, where Hamlet made his play. These boyos were Swedish, just over on the boat from Helsingbore, on the other side of the channel. They were rudely and roisteringly drunk. Right out of it.

Oddly enough, many Irish public health campaigners refer very favourably to Sweden’s draconian approach as a model for Ireland. That would surprise anyone who has had the dubious pleasure of travelling on a ferry between Sweden and anywhere else. The evidence from Helsingør is that whatever measures are in place aren’t working very well. It’s even possible that Swedish researchers are economic with the truth, or at least, selective in the data they collect.

Hence the graffiti painted on the walls near the port in Helsingør:

Hold byen ren – hjelp en svensker finde færgen hjem

Keep your town tidy. Help a Swede to find his ferry.