OPINION:There is unspoken disapproval of those who do not indulge the national drink obsession, writes JOHN WATERS
WE LIVE in an age when nothing can be grasped unless it is graphically expressed in statistical or, even better, financial terms. There are perhaps more obvious examples, but I was struck the other day, listening to a radio discussion about the economic costs of alcohol in the health system, by the thought that it has become necessary to reduce everything to money if you want to get anything understood. It is as if we cannot trust any other mechanism of human comprehension to accurately measure the scale of a damage or a wrong.
The discussion arose from a report in this newspaper, which, to be fair, put the issue, to begin with, in rather stark terms. “Alcohol blamed for 6,500 dead in five years”, the headline declared. Between 2000 and 2004, according to a recent public health study, 6,586 Irish people died directly from the effects of alcohol, or more than 100 every month. In those five years also, 10 per cent of hospitalisations were as a result of alcohol, the total cost of inpatient bed days coming close to €1 billion.
The co-ordinator of the study, Dr Jennifer Martin, informed the 2009 summer scientific meeting of the faculty of public health medicine of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland that this country now has one of the highest levels of alcohol consumption in the world. Alcohol-related deaths are nearly 50 per cent higher here than in the UK.
Dr Martin’s study broke new ground in quantifying not just deaths from diseases solely attributable to alcohol, but also those from conditions in which alcohol is known to be a factor. For the first time, a proportion of deaths from heart disease and cancers was included in the calculation. Dr Martin pointed out that her calculations in respect of health costs may embrace only a fraction of the total, since she counted only inpatient costs and not the overall economic burden on the health system.
For the past two decades we have been on something of a journey in relation to alcohol and understanding its effects on our society. It is less than 15 years since an attempt by the then environment minister to reduce the legal blood-alcohol limit to something more in line with other European countries was met with a media campaign based on the idea that this move would devastate what was called the “social fabric” of rural Ireland. Recently we have been congratulating ourselves on having “moved on”.
As someone who used to drink too much and then copped himself on, I still find this society a rather spongy place when it comes to discussion of drink and its irrefutably destructive effects. Things are not quite as bad as they were, but there remains a strong sentiment of unspoken disapproval of someone who refuses to indulge the national obsession with alcohol, by, for example, presenting himself bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at midnight to engage in a hellish procedure called “enjoying yourself”.
The idea that someone might want to sleep at 4am rather than stand with glass in hand listening to a summary execution of On Raglan Road continues to fill many of my fellow citizens with wonderment and, in their cups, not a little dudgeon. To order coffee in an Irish public house – virtually any public house – after 8pm is to be looked at as though you have just asked to sleep with the publican’s wife.
Anything that might make the world a little more pleasant for people whose idea of enjoying themselves does not involve imbibing a gallon of alcohol, is still regarded with suspicion.
A few years ago, as justice minister, Michael McDowell brought forward a proposal to extend the licensing system to introduce a form of café bar, with the objective of shifting the focus of Irish social life to reflect recent understandings of the true scale of the damage wrought by alcohol. He was set upon by the Fianna Fáil dogs of war and forced to step back from the idea.
Although we are again up to our necks in the economic do-do, and we know that the cost of alcohol has declined in relative terms to about half what it might have been if maintained in line with inflation, the Government still refuses to tax this lethal drug in proportion to either its revenue potential or its capacity for social harm.
Such a tax, as we are now left in no doubt, would save as much money as it would bring in, but the vintners’ lobby has ensured, under cover of the alleged risk to jobs arising from the availability of low-price alcohol over the Border, that the national drug is virtually given away for nothing.
It does not seem to occur to anyone that, if the drink-obsessed quotient of the population were to be stuck in a traffic jam in Newry, the rest of us would be better off in every conceivable way.