CONNECT: An autumn Friday in the early 1990s. Shortly after midnight in a city centre street in Turku, Finland, dozens of drunken men trickle, then pour from bars.
Like drunks everywhere, they stagger, stumble, shout, fall down and throw up. Many of them make, judging from their faces and accompanying hand gestures, aggressive remarks at other men and lewd suggestions at women.
Some of them walk in front of traffic and one wild-eyed bloke vomits on the bonnet of a car that has stopped to avoid hitting him. Others just rest on the kerb and groan in the typical sing- song ululations of the paralytically drunk. Remarkably, nearly all the drunks are dressed like businessmen - suits, striped shirts, ties. Many have briefcases. It looks like somebody has spiked a management conference with particularly potent poitín.
The scene is, in one sense, darkly comical. The business suits and briefcases seem incongruous with this number of drunks and the intensity of their intoxication. But there's an ominous air about it too. A shop window is smashed and a police or ambulance siren grows louder as it heads towards the scene. Sober people scurry away and the street is left to the drunks.
It feels threatening to be sober in a street like that, even though it must surely have been an aberration. Turku is a port city. It has a population of about 170,000, which makes it somewhat bigger than Cork. By day, it seems impeccably well-ordered in the typical Scandinavian way, so it can hardly put up with that level of drunkenness on a regular basis.
Still, it was scary how quickly the display of drunkenness went from amusing to alarming. It took just minutes. Initial flurries of loudness, punctuated by characteristic bouts of farcically boisterous singing, were funny. They promised a kind of daft, spontaneous gaiety - as though the spirits of the street might be vicariously lifted by benign Friday-night codology.
Quickly though, a critical mass of drunks was reached and the bonhomie evaporated. The mood flipped from funny to nasty so rapidly that it seemed as if a communal fermentation point had been reached, from which there could be no return until the drunks sobered up. The dynamics of drunken crowds appear susceptible to the moods of the nastiest drunks among them.
The Grafton Street attack last weekend on 35-year-old Barry Duggan has reignited public debate about the aggression associated with public drunkenness in Ireland. The social backgrounds of the three twentysomething men who, with solicitors, have since presented themselves to Pearse Street gardaí, evoked the drunken "businessmen" of Turku.
Traditionally, middle-class violence has not been quite so physical. "White-collar" crime, though it may yield far greater amounts of loot through embezzlement, tax-dodging and brown envelopes, has tended to be less obviously bloody. Alcohol, however, is changing that. It is now reaching parts of the middle-class psyche that were previously seldom reached.
It is not, of course, as if problem drinking was ever confined to any social class or classes. Across the board, from the most lumpen to the most aristocratic, alcohol has always claimed victims. Yet the current stress on business, on marketing, on maximising profit suggests that, when it comes to drink, the "bourgeoisification" of the world is consuming even its own.
There have always been and always will be drinkers who spend their last euro on alcohol. But illnesses, including brain damage, cirrhosis, the DTs, jaundice, ulcers, gastritis, vitamin deficiencies, premature ageing and misadventure mean that such "customers" need to be replaced regularly. The hospitals, asylums and cemeteries don't yield great profits for the brewers, distillers, vintners and publicans.
So, new drinkers are constantly needed to guzzle the stuff. The drinks barons, like the banks, operate on the principle of "get 'em young and you have 'em for life". Once their products are sold - most often by appeals to young people's libidos ("drink this and members of the opposite sex will find you irresistible") - the alcohol barons' responsibility is discharged.
That, at least, is the "morality" of business. Of course, moral values cannot be measured on a cash register and anyway it's up to the individual, is it not, to exercise restraint? Yeah, right! Drinks companies' marketers repeatedly promise him that swigging their concoction is going to make him "hotter" than David Beckham - and he's got to exercise restraint.
The ad-makers and their paymasters should exercise restraint. They promise idealised, unproblematic, consequence-free sex and then turn around to often gormless, hormonally inflamed young people and tell them to exercise restraint. A less avaricious, less primitive society couldn't possibly allow the kind of drinks advertising we do.
Certainly, the problem of young drunks congregating in towns and cities cannot be blamed totally on drinks' advertising. There are cultural and psychological factors - individual and communal - which must be addressed. The Turku scenes, for instance, must have had specific, probably complex reasons behind them.
But advertising, treating a dangerous drug as though it were merely the benign deliverer of twentysomething dreams, is criminally complicit in the carnage that shows up in A&E hospital departments every weekend. Those laddish ads for society's acceptable recreational drug have a wicked side alright. And it's not funny.