Tackling alcohol abuse

WE are thankfully approaching the end of the silly season. This is the season when the politicians and the lawyers are all on holidays and newspapers are forced to concentrate on the trivia to create headlines and sell their products.

This year, the gap between the real and the unreal was filled by presidential hopefuls, such as David Norris and Gay Byrne, and a French film star who had a leak on an airplane on his way to Ireland to make a film on the Burren.
This week, we filled our pages with leaks of a different kind. The usual Government sources spilled the beans about their plans for the future. There was Michael Noonan’s four-year programme (or was it a three-year one?) of further austerity measures, including more cuts in spending and more rises in taxation. We also had Environment Minister Phil Hogan’s plan to cut down on drink driving.
We had the normally doomy and gloomy economist, Morgan Kelly telling us that the only solution to our debt crisis is to wipe out the burden of mortgage debt owed by tens of thousands of homeowners up and down the country. This brought an immediate and mixed response from Government ministers. Junior Minister for Housing Willie Penrose said the Government should give the proposal “serious consideration”. His colleague, Junior Minister for Finance Brian Hayes dismissed the proposal as “an unrealistic option”.
So that’s a definite maybe for that plan.
However, one Government plan that seems certain to be introduced shortly is the one to further tackle the drinking culture in Irish society, or to be more precise, the drink-driving culture.
I do not have the latest figures for drink-driving convictions but those figures can never tell the full truth. Do they show a reduction or an increase in drink driving or do they show a more or a less strict garda response on the road?
However, I can see with my own eyes that there is far less tolerance for drink driving today than there was some years ago. The drunk driver is no longer looked on benignly as “a bit of a character” as he was in the past. He is now regarded as a danger to himself and to others on the road, while people are more inclined today to leave the car at home if they are going out to the pub for a few beers.
There will be mixed reactions to the plan to further reduce the amount of drink a person can consume before sitting in the driver’s seat of a car. In future, even one pint of beer will put a driver over the limit.
There will be those who will argue that one or two pints of beer or stout could never make a person drunk. My own experience is that one pint never satisfied me. “A bird never flew on one wing”, as Brendan Behan used to say. So if I am driving, I prefer not to have any drink at all just to be on the safe side and because having consumed one pint, the will to leave it at that is weakened. It is better to make it official and stop people from having to decide whether they will chance one pint or not.
However, all the penalties and limits in the world will not eliminate drink-driving completely, unless people believe there is a reasonable chance they will be stopped by a garda on the way home from the pub. I think that no man or woman will risk even a half-pint if he or she believes there might be a garda checkpoint on the way home. However, the same man or woman might drink six or seven pints if he or she knew there was no chance of being stopped by a garda.
The gardaí will argue that they do not have the resources to properly police the roads at night. That argument is as old as the garda force itself and, of course, there is a lot of truth in it, especially now as garda overtime is cut back and overall garda numbers are reduced in the recession.
There is a strong argument, however, that huge savings could be made if there were less accidents on the roads and fewer patients ending up in accident and emergency hospital wards. So many drunk drivers end up on mortuary slabs, with the lucky ones ending up in jail or in hospital, that any reduction in those awful statistics would be welcomed and the savings made should be poured into greater garda resources.
While stiffer penalties for drink-driving might help to drive those mortuary, hospital and jail numbers down, the reality is that they must be accompanied by greater garda enforcement.
However, the problem is not confined to drink-driving. It relates to every aspect of the drinking culture in Ireland and especially to the problem of underage drinking.
The plain truth is that we drink far too much. We don’t know when to stop and we don’t know how to stop our children from drinking.
When it comes to drugs, substances such as heroin and cocaine grab the headlines but the problems caused by alcohol abuse are far more widespread than those caused by illegal drugs.
We know all that. I am not saying anything that is not already well known and yet, we do nothing about it apart from increasing some of the penalties for drink-driving and reducing some of the others.
The Government does not seem to have any plan to reduce the instances of domestic violence caused by alcohol, no more than the previous Government had. We don’t hear about any new ideas to prevent gangs of drunken bowsies running amok on the streets of our towns and cities on weekend nights. How about some scheme to protect hospital staff from violent and drunken assaults in emergency departments on Saturday nights?
What we do get from the Government – and from every government – are public relations’ exercises designed to sell even more alcohol. There is no plan to curb the glamorisation of drink in TV advertising.
However, every time a foreign VIP, whether it is the Queen of England or the President of America, calls to our shores, they are forced to drink a pint of stout for the cameras or visit the Guinness Brewery.
The Government is naturally concerned about the economic crisis. It should be more worried about the crisis that is alcohol abuse.