A nation of first class drinkers

international | consumer issues | opinion/analysis Wednesday June 07, 2006 15:00 by Kathy Sinnott

Ireland maintains its clear lead over European rivals

Once again we have scored top of the class in drinking: amount consumed and money spent on alcohol per person, most binge drinking with special honours for the exceptional, young average age of our binge drinkers.

With an especially good result again this year, I really don’t think we give ourselves enough credit or make a big enough fuss about the almost yearly drinking awards we receive. Granted this year’s headlines were colorful but it was still just a flash in the pan. I suppose it is an inevitable result of our natural modesty that in the face of victory, we prefer to celebrate quietly with a binge drink or 10 among friends.

But I think the least we could do is to put our blue ribbons on public display for general admiration. Hospital corridors might be a good place, even better would be the A & E wards of our capital's hospitals. The walls are so drab and people spend so many hours there it would give them something to look at.

Of course, we don’t always get all the blue rosettes, occasionally the Russians or Finns inch ahead in a drinking category or two usually in a cold year when they drink a bit more to keep warm and attempt to keep despondency at bay in their dark long winter days. But they don’t have a winter that cold every year so our ability to turn sports, wakes and weddings, junior and leaving cert results, children allowance, Christmas, St. Stephen, New Years, Paddy’s day…Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, every day into an occasion for drink sees us victorious again, and again, and again and….. Amen.

And what is going to ensure our success in the drinking stakes into the future ( because it is of course important to plan for the future) is that we have now extended our drinking age (not legally but effectively) down to include even the youngest of teenagers. True we have had to accommodate their younger needs by introducing alcopops. You can’t expect kids who like ice lolls and take mars bars in their school lunch to take to astringent whiskey or bitter Guinness so straight. Nor can we expect them to pay as much so we’ve had to ensure that we keep a few more affordable ciders at the low end of the market.

With the enlistment of the young we have a significant lead over Europe’s other big drinkers (three times the consumption per capita).The immediate future looks rosy. The strategy was good if unimaginative, recruiting new drinkers has worked for us before. With the subversion of groups like the Pioneer total abstinence Association things were touch and go a few decades ago. We could have fallen hopelessly behind the competition if we hadn’t finally managed to convince the ladies to join the craic. It wasn’t easy, there was certainly resistance from the “it's not lady-like”, or “the drink is a scourge” groups but the problem sorted itself out when women took up the cause themselves with the “the anything a man can do we can do better” campaign that effectively won the hearts and minds of the ladies.

Of course now that we have the ladies, the teens, and of course the men, or at least as many of them as we can get, (there will always be hold outs), we will continue for the present to come best of show. But the minute we get complacent then we might as well kiss the contest goodbye. There is a worrying trend of a slight downward trend since that year of years, 2001. And since enlargement some immigrants do their part and bring up the average, but with a substantial number of immigrants who come to work and save or who don’t drink for religious purposes the overall effect of immigration may be to threaten our prizewinning per person drink average and may even be causing the dilution of our native drinking statistics. We have to think even further ahead.

Of course if our national drinking began to seriously slip we could always drink more, We would only need to hold a few more fetes, outdoor festivals, sporting events, but then without unreliable climate we wouldn’t want to count on that. Maybe we should not rely on the binge but get down to serious daily imbibing like our star players.

In the meantime we can sustain the occasional second place without ruining our average, we have as I say endured it before. But if we ever slip to third, we certainly would not want to shake confidence by letting people know. As for putting a white ribbon with the blue and reds on the A & E walls? Unthinkable! There would be no point in shaming ourselves. Besides there wouldn’t be quite the same crowd spending quite so long in A&E if we were only scoring thirds or worse, mere honourable mention.

If, as I say, we ever get desperate and can’t drink any more than we are drinking, or Heaven forbid, people start drinking less or we have no new sections of the population to draft, or abstemiousness becomes a fashion, then we will just have to lower the prices and try to pull a price cut to boost drinking. But that may not be possible because so much of the price is tax, hundreds of millions of euro of tax. And tax is itself an imperative and a guarantee of clear passage for our crazy self destructive drink binge in the first place.