The big ticket solution on offer is minimum unit pricing.
About four people a week were killed on the roads last year. Meanwhile, alcohol-related disease kills three people a day. Consider the difference in public awareness. A quarter of injuries admissions to emergency departments are alcohol-fuelled. It captures a precious 1,500 hospital beds every night. Behind those shocking statistics are every day stories of multi-generational catastrophe. We can debate the statistics about alcohol-consumption figures till doomsday but these are the facts. Education campaigns have failed. The “Drink Responsibly” slogan is risibly bland and useless. My preferred option – city centre hospital treatment units built, managed and financed entirely by the drinks industry – has not materialised. The drink culture lives on.
What makes ours exceptional is that so much of it happens out in the open, reeling around our streets, shaking its stupid, menacing fists in our faces, leaving its disgusting excretions on our footpath to be washed away by heroic council staff.
Putting a serious dent in a culture requires true grit. The near elimination of smoky coal, indoor smoking, drink-driving all serve as monuments to politicians such as Mary Harney and Micheál Martin, who pushed on regardless of the lobbyists and emotive clamour. It was fearless legislation, sustained enforcement and scary, life-changing sanctions that flipped the culture of drink-driving.
Source: Kathy Sheridan, The Irish Times, 23/09/15
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