Drinks ban would advertise phoney piety

Locker Room: All right, it 's not an issue you 'd lay down your life for, and one suspects the arguments against this latest outbreak of gesture politics will be muted and reluctant. But this whole business of alcoholic sponsorship of sporting events: is it not just conspicuous piety?

You won 't be laying down your life and neither will the GAA. As David Beckham
could tell you, texts and texting are the street demotic of our time and the purveyors of texts and texting instruments are queuing up to sponsor sports events. So rumour has it that Guinness will be slow poured off into a quiet corner and the All-Ireland hurling championship will be sponsored by some
mobile phone company until somebody comes screaming into the Minister 's office
bearing in his hand a sheet of paper with figures about brain cells being roasted by mobile phones and thumbs being deformed by texting addictions and car accidents being caused by the sudden, urgent shrill of a Nokia. And so on.

Nobody will get out there and fight, because we all know that the coalition of
Guinness and the GAA and hurling is just too large and juicy a target for the soldiers of piety. There has been little or no fundamentalist shrieking about the Powers Grand National or the Heineken European Cup or the countless other links between sport and alcohol sales. Little enough examination of how we came to be the way we are with the drink and our immature, ban-or-binge approach to it.

Being a sports journalist doesn't make one well placed to make judgments about many things, but drink is surely one of them. We work in an industry, specifically in a branch of that industry,where the addicts are celebrated peers, where the stories of ripe but ruined men who were saloon bar legends
but domestic nightmares have fed and nourished and amused us down the years.

Until recently, and perhaps still, drink was a feasible and reasonable excuse for turning in poor work or no work at all. Drink was the working practice equivalent of an Act of God. Drink could strike at any time.

Somebody would fill in. The show would go on. Another anecdote on the pile. We love those stories. Fellas wandering lost in foreign cities. Lads legless and on mileage. Left on Friday, didn't get back till Wednesday and never saw a ball kicked in anger. Y drinking all day and X writing a column for him.
Sports journalism is geared towards drinking. The hours are convivial. The pub is a good place for the launching of opinions and the harvesting or rumour. And it 's possible to cruise from reception to reception hoovering up free drinks while the average Joe Schmoe is putting down the nine to five and playing catch-up till closing time.

We've all worked with happy drinkers and ruined drinkers and secret drinkers and
fellas who couldn't handle it and fellas who thought they could but their families couldn't. They all loved their sport and they all loved their booze. I don 't think, though, that the dastardly coalition of advertising and sports events is what did any of them in. It was the culture.

Turn the Guinness Hurling Championship into the Texty Thumbs Hurling Championship and what do you have? Grey skies and a lousy public health service.
Depression, unemployment and crap jobs. A pub at every corner and several in between. Songs about drink, stories about drink, events about drink. You have the legends of the Dáil Bar, Clinton in Fagans with Gallon O 'Bass Bertie. You have the ban-or-binge culture intact.

What will change? The GAA will survive until such time as one of the Pharisees suggests going after bars in sporting clubs, and then there will be war because, while the flagship sponsorship is an easy target for gesture politicians, the fact will remain that many clubs depend on drinks sales for the purchase of equipment and the maintenance of pitches and –let ’s face it –the promotion of comradeship and collegiality.

Will our culture change? I can ’t remember the first time I had a drink or the first time I got drunk or when hangovers ceased to be a problem. It was all seamless back then.

There was no encouragement towards sensible drinking. No peer pressure. No hand on the shoulder. Just sport. I never thought that a few pints would make me able to score last-minute goals from frees on the 21-yard line, but I had the occasional coach who said, "Jaysus lads, don 't be drinking at the weekend ",or "give up them fags "or "try to think of yourselves as athletes ".There was the odd glimpse through sport of some higher level of dignity and self-respect in which the odd drink might play a part but which ritual leglessness wasn't cool.
I've never felt that the links between alcohol advertising and sport have been
anything other than beneficial to sport.

Guinness sold hurling in a way that it has never been sold.

And, for a start, drinks advertising tends not to increase market size but to influence brand choice. Secondly, advertising is less avant garde than we give it credit for.

Advertisers tend to reinforce those preconceived ideas about alcohol consumption already prevalent in our cultural landscape. That landscape is the problem. In Temple Bar we have created a sort of Euro Binge theme park based on our stereotype as the continent ’s premier boozers. In night clubs and other venues, we have an evolving culture of drinks promotions wherein kids are the lab rats for the science of making alcohol more palatable and as easy to get down you as a fizzy drink. You can get from stone-cold sober to outer space in less time and with less expense than previous generations thought possible.

Meanwhile, enforcement of laws regarding drinking age is patchy at best,
hypocritical at worst. Meanwhile, in the era of gesture politics sport is deemed to be the problem. For problem, read easy target. An arena where people still gather and rub shoulders as living, breathing elements of a community and maybe have a few drinks beforehand or afterwards. Will the removal of drinks sponsorship from a few sports events make everything all right in the lives of kids who need vodka shots just to get the evening kick-started? Nope, but we 'll feel better.

Guinness will be syphoned off. The chance to see sport as part of the solution, the chance to use sport as an educator on a campaign for moderate, sensible drinking will be missed. Ban or binge, the same old immaturity.

We don 't know yet if youth-oriented RTÉ series will be sponsored by drinks
companies, if the coverage of sports events will be sponsored by same. Will other forms of expression apart from sport be affected? Will traditional music be removed from pubs and played only in the brace of the open air? Will rock stars be forced to wear pioneers pins? Will the movies be populated only by the
abstemious? Will all theatre productions carry admonitions towards moderation?

Will all negative peer pressure on kids end, will all the more specifically targeted marketing campaigns end, will foreign media comply for our benefit, will we go back to making drink taste worse and harder to drink? Will we limit the number of pubs?

Will we change our prevailing culture? We don ’t know, can ’t know, if we’ll be any different from France, where the extreme Loi Evin has banished all advertising from sports events and has hit the wine industry but has failed to influence the drinking habits of young people.

We don 't know, but it 's not about knowing. It 's about being seen to do something, anything. It 's about a little Roman candle of piety being flared up
amidst the smouldering piles of the old integrity down at the tribunals. Keep us distracted. Keep us quiet. Keep us looking the other way.
Not a battle anyone is going to die for.