Discussing Ireland's worsening drink problem, John Bowman put a question to a pundit on a recent Questions & Answers programme. "Who's to blame?" he asked. "Is it the advertisers or the culture?"
Although it's the kind of question which could engage barflies for hours, sociologists for years and writers for it's a sobering thought that it's practically impossible to answer. It's true that advertising and culture are not synonymous. Indeed, in some they're as starkly different as methylated spirits and Dom Perignon. But in the new Ireland, advertising and culture absorb so much of each other that trying to separate them is like trying to separate the gin from the tonic after they've been poured into the same glass.
Advertising is parasitic on culture, but it is also part - a growing part - of culture. "You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements," said the British writer, Norman Douglas. If so, what sort of ideals are being promoted by drinks advertising and even by the fact that so many foreigners get their first impressions of Ireland through "Irish pubs" abroad? In every continent, such pubs - our answer to Chinese restaurants, American burger joints and Italian pizza parlours - are advertised as exemplars of Irish culture.
They're mostly bogus, of course, and certainly not what they're tweely craic-ed up to be. Yet, in combining Ireland, drink, advertising and culture (albeit cod culture), they form a potent cocktail of symbols. This cocktail tells us that in much of the world, we are practically synonymous with alcohol ("I drink, therefore I am . . . Irish".) OK, that's a little facetious because we are not the world's only boozers. The American Indians, the Scots, the Scandinavians, the Russians and others are also widely perceived as drinking to drunkenness too often.
But even if they do, they don't appear to view their drinking as somehow cute, redeeming or leprechaunised in the Irish way. They certainly don't market their relationship with alcohol as the basis of such huge self-delusions as craic and the related nonsense about the Irish "teaching the world how to party". Whether it's cultural myopia or simply wishful thinking, we really do appear to believe our own dope in relation to drink. Advertising then enhances the deception.
Still, few irritants are as vile as sermons about the evils of drink. If you want to drive a drunk to the bottle, start sermonising. In fact, you'd hardly need psychologists and addiction counsellors to tell you why it works like that. If alcoholism and even the abuse of alcohol can be regarded as a reaction of certain individuals to a world they experience as dismal, then lecturing people so predisposed is rubbing their noses in the crap they are seeking to flee.
No surprise then that intervention with even temporarily sober drunks is usually a testy business. Yet something must be done. All of us know of lives ruined, directly and indirectly, by alcohol. Deaths by murder, manslaughter, misadventure, suicide and illness occur as a result of drink. Then there's the violence, physical and psychological, done to spouses, kids, relatives, friends, enemies, even strangers.
Illnesses include brain damage, cirrhosis, the DTs, jaundice, ulcers, gastritis, vitamin deficiencies, premature ageing and, aptly perhaps, whatever you're having yourself, as lack of nourishment depresses the immune system and leaves heavy drinkers open to a range of diseases. Down the league, there's stuff like "the shakes", hangovers, guilt, mortification, shame and wages wasted.
Slainte? Nice touch of Gaelic irony, that!
Drink's got to be powerful stuff for a society to pay that price (even though the payments are unequally spread) and keep coming back for more. Certainly, we ought not be too sanctimonious about it. Apart from being counter-productive, such an attitude refuses to recognise that there are very human reasons why people abuse drink. There are, albeit in varying degrees, issues of personal responsibility involved. But there are also issues of unfashionable communal responsibility, and advertising is in that category. Problem is, we have created a culture in which advertising is neither willing nor encouraged to take its own responsibilities seriously enough.
A less avaricious, less primitive society couldn't possibly allow the kind of drinks advertising that we do. Then again, a less avaricious, less primitive society couldn't allow much of the other advertising we do. If advertising is part of culture - and it is - it's part of what we are. But who's in control? Consider the Advertising Standards Authority for Ireland (ASAI). Formed in 1981, it is an independent, self-regulatory outfit, set up and financed by the advertising industry.
In its own words, it is "committed in the public interest to promoting the highest standards of advertising and sales promotion". The "public interest" bit is good, eh? How can the public interest be a major priority for private companies whose primary goal is profit? The stated objective of the ASAI is "to ensure that all commercial advertisements are legal, decent, honest and truthful". Despite elaborate codes of practice, there is no serious recognition of the subjective nature of such value judgments. To be fair, the ASAI is not alone among professional and business bodies in appropriating the right to rule on ethical matters concerning its own line of business.
But consider a laddish night out with the Smithwick's drinkers or a laddish night in with the Budweiser "Waaaasssuuuppp?" brigade. Consider drinking Guinness and going surfing with horses, or drinking it and feeding aphrodisiac oysters to a clearly randy woman in a bikini that probably weighs less and certainly covers less than the dollops of mascara she's wearing. Or consider the Bailey's woman who practically caresses herself to an orgasm at the prospect of her favourite tipple. And so it goes on, as it has for many years. Though the emphasis is now more extreme than ever, even long before "Sally O'Brien and the way she might look at you", drink, like almost everything else, was being flogged by advertisers as a deliverer of sex. There might be more than a grain of truth in this, of course. But, like water and wine, sex (the idealised, unproblematic and consequence-free sex of advertising) and drink don't really mix. Legal, decent, honest and truthful? Well, it's legal all right, which just goes to show how much commercial propaganda this culture is either prepared to tolerate or unable not to tolerate.
Consider some contrasting images of drink. Instead of randy women, laddish nights and surfing horses, think of car crashes, lock-up wards, casualty wards, battered wives, trembling kids, women on the game for the booze, blokes with a cubic foot of swollen liver. See people reduced to madness, all sense of morality scoured out of them by hard drinking, which promised something rather different: randy women, laddish nights and surfing horses, for instance.
Or consider the advertised promise of community in the kind of warm place where everybody knows your name and life is always lived in that beautiful, perfectly pitched, inebriated but pre-drunken glow. Then think of the savage aloneness of people going through the DTs or losing their partners, children, relatives, friends, jobs and all the rest. Think of destitution. Some community that. The motto of the ASAI oozes Latin gravitas: "Fiant secundum descriptionem bona." Apparently, this means "let the product accord with its description". What can you say? As far as advertising is concerned, it increasingly appears that the aim is to have the product accord with its description as littlus as possibilus. It's not only in drink advertising that this attitude prevails, but consider an award-winning ad - as judged by other advertisers - for cider. There's an architect, a musician, a sculptor, even a scientist, eulogising about "standing on the shoulders of giants". No doubt, this is all very well and award-winning, but it's some distance from the product or any recognisable description of the flagon culture of teenagers and winos that most of us associate with cider.
Fair enough. Presumably, that's the point of the ad: to - I believe the industry term is - "re-position" cider in the public mind. As a business plan, this seems a legitimate and reasonable aim. But it negates the ad industry's claim that advertising is simply about alerting the public to choices. If a drink can be "re-positioned", then it can be advertised to increase consumption. To pretend that there's no relationship between the advertising of alcohol and the destruction caused by drink is even more dishonest than drink advertising's promises of sex, surfing horses and laddish nights of banter.
So, we end up back in the unquantifiable territory of the degree to which drink is simply a commodity. It doesn't matter excessively if a shoes promotion is so successful that it begets a legion of Imelda Marcos wannabes with 200 pairs of shoes each. But an ad which boosts sales of drink - and it's not really succeeding if it doesn't - cannot but boost drink problems as well as, in fairness, the enjoyment people get from it.
Because ads pay so many of the media's bills, there are few publications in which they can be seriously criticised. In that sense, they enjoy the same sort of protected status that priests' sermons were previously accorded. The question of their impact on forming attitudes throughout society is a huge one. Television, in particular, has been widely analysed in this regard. But it is almost always only in academic publications, read by specialised minorities, or by force-feeding generally reluctant (understandably, given their average age) students that the effects of the propaganda of the media's paymasters are discussed and studied. Protected by the ultimate power of writing the cheques, advertisers know well how to use their strength.
Of course, it would be absurd to claim that a prohibition on drink advertising (including the necessary ban on drink companies sponsoring sports events) would eliminate drink problems. Even with no push from advertising, people would abuse drink. It's unlikely, for instance, that the poitin-heads of 19th-century Ireland needed images of excited women, lad culture or surfing horses to get them drinking. The culture around them - harsh, repressive, static - generated enough good reasons to convince people to get twisted.
Life still does provide such reasons (as Humphrey Bogart noted: "The problem with the world is that everyone is a few drinks behind."). But the difference now is that advertising also generates its own set of images to get people drinking. Urges that already exist are targeted and normalised, and that is a central part of the culture around us. Drink ads show us an idealised face of society's acceptable recreational drug and that exacerbates a very ugly reality.