Diageo, the country’s largest drinks company and owner of Guinness, is to pour millions into a public awareness campaign aimed at preventing excessive drinking.
However, the Stop Out-Of-Control Drinking initative has brought accusations that the company is using a public health concern for PR purposes.
Campaign chairman Fergus Finlay, the chief executive of Barnardos, has also been forced to defend his decision to accept the drinks company’s approach to be chair and to use its money.
He said he and the other board members, who include health professionals, had taken a lot of convincing that Diageo’s claims to want to be part of the solution to problem drinking were genuine. He said he had an undertaking that the company would not try to influence campaign activities.
“It will be up to people to make up their own minds whether the campaign is honest and truthful,” he said. “Get involved, suspend judgment, and if you think it’s spin, walk away.”
The campaign is beginning with a series of advertisements plus meetings for the public and for experts and professionals which will take place in Dublin, Cork, Limerick, and Galway throughout March.
An action plan based on feedback from those meetings will be published in the summer and the aim is make out-of-control drinking socially unacceptable by 2021.
Source: Caroline O’Doherty, 13/02/15
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