"NINETY THREE per cent of Leaving Cert students drink - and 75 per cent of Junior Cert students." The addiction counsellor has our full attention.

"Even in a nice school like ours," asks one parent tentatively at a school meeting called to discuss teenagers and alcohol. The counsellor, and, we note, a number of the teachers laugh ruefully. `Yes, even in a school like ours.'

Teenage drinking is a fact of life we're all familiar with, but the headlines and the statistics don't mean anything until the teenager drinking is yours. And no matter how clued in you are, it will give you a jolt when you realise your eldest child drinks, or wants to drink.

Will you allow it? Can you stop them? What should you say to your kids about alcohol? The only certainty is that you'd better think all this through early on, for current statistics show that the average age for Irish teenagers to start drinking is 13 or 14. By the time they're 17, only seven percent are NOT drinking. And this is true for both sexes and all social classes, according to the definitive ESRI report "Drinking amongst post primary school pupils" published in 1994, which identified a really shocking rise in underage drinking between 1984 and 1992.

In an ideal world, your child would wait until he or she had reached 18 and the legal age limit before taking a drink, and after that, would become the sensible social drinker you think you are or at least not repeat some of your more embarrassing drinking moments.

In practice, you may well be faced with a 15 year old son who comes home drunk after a feed of post match pints, or picking up your 16 year old daughter from a party and having to stop the car on the way home so she can get sick.

So what should be your ground rules?

First of all, you should probably clean up your own act so that you present your children with a good role model. This is a point made by Maire Russell, assistant director of Dublin's Rutlandtentre, an addiction treatment unit, and by the Health Promotion Unit's very helpful booklet, "You, Drink, and Your Children." No matter what guidance you provide on drinking, bad example - getting drunk regularly, clearly using alcohol to deal with pressure - will provide its own message.

Second, talk about it. "Personally, I believe at the beginning of the teenage years parents should talk to their children about all the issues that will arise, from sex to drugs to drinking. You need to give them good, accurate information, to let them know that alcohol is a drug that will affect their mood and their behaviour in ways they won't be able to predict and might not be able to control," says Russell.

Many parents and professionals agree that the most important thing then is to encourage your children to tell you when they start drinking, or want to start. It is, as Russell says, a difficult balancing act. You don't want to promote drinking by being too accepting, but you have to be realistic. And it is better to know what they are doing than to turn a blind eye.

Brian, a father of three sons, says: "Some of their friends didn't dare go home smelling of drink, so they'd spend the night on our floor, sobering up. If you lay down absolute rules, they'll lie to you.

You have to be prepared to see your child coming home drunk: anybody who starts to drink has little knowledge of how much, or what they can safely drink. But Russell warns against slagging teenagers, even older teenagers, who are hungover, as some parents do. "If you re worried, if you feel it's happening too often, you should sit down later and tell them so, get them to talk about it."

Many parents believe that it's sensible to introduce children to alcohol at home. Mark Morgan, coauthor of the ESRI report on teen drinking and father of three children aged 14, 18, and 22, thinks permitting an occasional glass of wine with a meal is civilised and sensible, coupled with providing accurate information about alcohol, treating it as a health issue, like smoking.

But this is a contentious issue that divides concerned adults. Russell believes it's a slippery slope, providing alcohol to a teenager who won't have the same level of responsibility as an adult. And addiction counsellor Enda Mulvey thinks it makes no more sense than introducing them to any other drug.

Somehow you have to balance trust with common sense. For example, Russell thinks it's probably wiser to lock up your own alcohol supplies, especially if your kids are likely to be alone in the house fir, long. "Teenagers will experiment," she says.

Many of us muddle on as best we can, hoping that honesty and trust will see us through.

Nancy, a mother of five daughters, says she allowed her 16 and 17 year olds to go to pubs when this became the main social activity of their friends - but asked them not to drink alcohol. "After that, all you can do is trust them." And like Mark Morgan, she believes alcohol should be discussed as a health as well as a social issue, with frank attention to long term problems as well as short term ones - like drink leading to unplanned and unprotected sexual activity.

The major long term problem, of course, is alcohol dependence and regular alcohol abuse (and possibly moving on to other drugs). In a drinking culture like Ireland's, where every event is celebrated with often excessive drinking, it would be pious of adults to wonder why drink is so attractive to our kids.

Mulvey believes strongly that it is important to tell your child if there is any history of alcoholism in the family; genetic factors play a part in alcoholism and if granny or grand dad had a problem, they need to know.

BUT HE also believes a pragmatic approach is not quite enough to deal with the threat that alcohol poses to some children and that we should learn something from the experience of recovering alcoholics.

Most, he says, are people who suffered from low self esteem, who literally bottled up their problems because they had no one to help them cope with them. So he believes we need to transform our relationships with our children, giving them time and space to talk over their problems, to reassure them that we love and care for them. He worries about the children who will discover all too young to conceal their fears and cope with their problems through alcohol.

This, plus education, could be the key to reducing the pressures on teenagers to drink. Peer pressure is the strongest factor encouraging Irish kids to drink, and since most teenagers are drinkers by the age of 17, it's a pressure that's virtually inescapable.

Mulvey thinks that many teenagers really do want help to resist that pressure, and regular, consistent information about the use and abuse of alcohol, provided from sixth class onwards, might help them to cope better.