Fulmination Once Again

As I write, Official Ireland is working up a lather over drunken excess during the St. Patrick’s Festival. Thundering editorials imply that we can’t be let loose on our own. The ‘we’ word is abused as in ‘why can’t we behave in a civilised fashion?’

Well, it all depends on what ‘civilised’ means, yizzer honours. Lots of ‘civilised' people behave like barbarians in their own way.
This overweening hand-wringing and fulminating was triggered by reports of drunkenness and public disorder. In particular, the trashing of two Dublin DART trains out around Howth sparked outrage.
Well, there’s nothing new in that. Ask your grandfather about the famous ‘Mystery Tours’ of the 1950s…
These were trains that took off without the passengers knowing where they were going. All good fun – you might wind up in Kilkenny or Portarlington or Limerick or wherever.
For a period they were colonised by battle-hardened heat-seeking Teddy Boys from Dublin. The trains had bars and, besides, people could drink wherever they arrived. In due course trouble flared. Trains were routinely trashed.
Actually, when you look at the numbers of people who gathered in our cities and towns on Patrick’s day, the level of trouble wasn’t that bad at all and certainly in Dublin the air of menace that characterised the latter part of the same day in 2004 was absent. All in all, it was rather charming.
But there’s no way that Official Ireland’s huffers want to hear that. RTE in particular went to town and back again in its coverage. They made it sound like the battle of the Somme.
It was their lead item, more important to the RTE newsroom than the McCartneys in America, robberies, murders or manslaughters.
It’s fascinating. Like the rest of the media, they were looking for trouble. On the evening of March 16th, a newshound was dispatched from Pat Kenny’s programme to scour Temple Bar for drunken depravity.
Well, he met loads of foreigners who thought it was all grand. There were some Irish people who were a bit jarred. But it was all sweetness and light. ‘Amiable’ was how it was described.
This seemed to discomfit the station. The whole point of the Patrick’s festival, one sensed, was to provide RTE with ready-made programme fodder. You know, like people vomiting, urinating and fighting in the streets watched by horrified tourists.
That would provide a week’s worth of phone-ins and expert debates. It would allow Official Ireland to flay the bar owners and the drinks industry and to fulminate like Redemptorists against the perfidies of our failed nannies in Government.
You can see why they were a bit sacked off when it seemed that little happened and why, in due course, they seized on the reports of bad behaviour with such gusto.
Now I’m not suggesting that all was delicacy and sobriety. Obviously not. There’s the descendants of the teddy boy seat-slashers for a start, as well as a small but significant group of wankers who go out looking to rumble.
But mostly it’s just noise, people combining too much drink, too little food and exhaustion. It ain’t exactly pretty, but what the hell?
This RTE preoccupation was also illustrated a couple of weeks ago when the Morning Ireland programme carried an interview with Joe Barry, lecturer in public health in Trinity College and new temperance mullah.
The interview was ostensibly about research carried out in Cork into the drinking habits of adolescents which raises very interesting issues. For example, it suggests that girls in single sex schools are less susceptible to male peer pressure to drink excessively than those in co-educational establishments.
Such differences have preoccupied educational researchers for a long time. The Economic and Social Research Institute has conducted extensive research in the area.
In general, girls in single sex schools seem to do better academically but those in co-ed schools make better social adaptations. But there’s lots more involved. So, you might think that the Cork research would have made for an interesting debate…
Not a bit of it. For a start, Joe’s not a wide-vision guy. He stays on message. And since there was nobody else being interviewed, he was able to clamber onto his soapbox unopposed. So we heard that young people drink way too much nowadays but nothing about the core question raised by the research.
Such a waste. Because, while we know that young females in Ireland have increased their drinking to a far greater degree than young males, we don’t know why.
Does the Cork research suggest part of the answer? Maybe, but other researchers say it’s competitive, not led. And right wing ideologists blame feminist empowerment…and so on.
As I said, it's a fascinating area, so it’s really disappointing that one of the country’s experts on public health either knew nothing about such debates or chose to ignore them in order to push the same old, same old message.
Even sadder, the more interesting and challenging questions weren't asked, giving him a clear run to the line. But then, what he was saying fitted the RTE and Official Ireland stereotype of the Irish (and especially young Irish) as drunk and out-of-control and in need of the heavy hand of authority – so what else would you expect?
That more than a million actively enjoyed Patrick’s day without getting pissed or out of hand is clearly not as big a story as the few hundred who did. It’s getting boring.