Ireland's war on booze

Forget the war on terrorism or the halcyon days of the war on poverty: the Republic of Ireland is in the midst of a crisis about the demon drink. Despite the long-standing stereotype, the trends show fairly clearly that what brought alcohol consumption to crisis point was the dramatic gain in wealth over the last 15 years. Symbolically, the crisis has therefore arrived just as the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development declares that the Celtic Tiger boom that brought it about is dead. And we are not going to engage in any kind of contrarian nonsense (there really isn't a problem, it was always like this) -- Ireland really does have a drink problem. It's just not clear what the problem is.

The symptoms are clear -- the main street of any Irish town can be an edgy place after midnight, when the pubs empty out, and hospitals treat inordinate numbers of drink-related cases. Of course, these wayward tendencies interact with a culture where drinking is accessible, socially acceptable, and still fairly cheap. And yet closing times are still restrictive by Continental European standards, and Irish beer has lower alcohol content than in many other countries. Indeed the latter feature (shared with Britain) explains why even the Irish lager lout with some degree of self-discipline finds himself getting drunker than he expected on those overseas holidays. So there's a sense in which we just can't handle the booze the way other people can. Then again, the yout (sic) of Ireland could be forgiven for the mixed messages, because our Taoiseach (PM) Bertie Ahern's favourite prop for his "man of the people" pose is a pint.

Anyway, the government's response to the sense of crisis is a fairly predictable step-up in enforcement of hours and age restrictions and a broadside against alcohol sponsorship of sports teams. But they are really trying to stop the tide on that one because the alcohol = sport message will still beam in undisturbed from the UK. It's not clear that they are really getting at what it is in the Irish character that (in some cases) makes for these fairly sudden transitions from reasonable and well-behaved to alienated and aggressive. We don't have any bright ideas about this problem either.