Binge Drinking needs treatment

Binge Drinking needs treatment

Recently Sean Kelly, President of the GAA, said that Ireland has the worst record of binge drinking in Europe. He was worried as GAA president that we were losing an entire generation of young men to drink. His emphasis was on young men, and rightly so as they have the most serious problems, but young women are also being lost to drink.

So what can be done? There are no easy “add-powder-and-water” solutions to this problem. It calls for reform of our society and a root and branch change in our attitude to drink.

A visitor to this city, who has spent long periods in Derry, and who is from the Mediterranean area, has remarked to me on occasions on how we wrap up drink in a mystery in this country. It is the forbidden fruit that young people are forbidden even to see before the age of eighteen.

That contrasts strongly with his own country’s attitudes to alcohol. Alcohol is on sale everywhere in his country – in garages and in supermarkets, not just off-licences. It is sold for consumption on the premises in cafés and not just bars.

There is a mystery for young people about alcohol in our culture and like any thing that is made into a mystery and hidden away as a forbidden fruit, all the young people can’t wait to get off their marks and stuck into the object substance, which happens to be drink.

We have a whole ream of laws preventing children access to bars and not allowing them to drink alcohol before they are eighteen. This adds to the culture of secrecy about drink and increases the likelihood that young people will think of drink as a precious commodity that they “need” to get their hands on. It is a recipe for creating binge-drinkers.

If you hide away sweets from a child, he will always want sweets because you have created a fascination about sweets in the child.

It is the old story of how God expected Adam and Eve to be able to cope with not eating the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. Was God serious? Did he seriously expect that they would not eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? Did he expect that we would remain innocent forever?

The answer is, of course not. God knew that we would be tempted because he knows us better than anyone else. He made us.

That is why we must begin to demystify drink. We must show that we have learned from the experience in Eden where something that turned out not always to be good for us was presented to us as extremely precious and which we must have gained a complex about by the time we ate it.

Demystifying drink is not the only thing we can do. We could also create a café culture, which would stop the association between going out and drinking lots of alcohol.

Café culture simply means opening more cafés and getting those which are open to open late at night. At present it is almost impossible to get a café open after six o’clock.

We must let young people learn to respect themselves and their bodies again. Binge drinking is destructive to the body. It destroys the souls of young people. For young people to respect themselves they must learn not to be destructive.

In my opinion café culture is feasible in this city and we could make it part of the tourist drive to attract more visitors. It would lead as well to a safer city for all of our people, tourists or citizens.

Café culture is being implemented in many places in England and Wales at the moment. There have been surveys conducted that suggest that urban crime is reduced considerably when cafés open late and take young people away from the excessive drink.

Café culture is very common on mainland Europe where there is very little trouble from binge drinking. It is part and parcel of the cultures of the Mediterranean countries, where the notion that someone would go out with the sole purpose of getting drunk would be seen as indicating that someone is ill or under severe duress. It just isn’t done.

I have seen it myself. I sat among Mediterranean townspeople on a night out, where they sat sipping their wine or beer in a non-aggressive way. There was no trouble and there wasn’t a policeman in sight, which compares radically with our culture where policemen live in fear of the weekend and late-night drinkers.

And yet in our culture, binge drinking is quite normal. Binge drinking is the norm in many bars around the city. We have no sensible attitude to drinking alcohol. We just gurgle it down our throat as if it was going out of fashion.

As for the opposition to café culture from the publicans, which was evident in the south recently when Minister McDowell attempted to implement legal changes to allow café culture, the case has to be argued by politicians. For them to do that, you must put pressure on them to act. If you’re in favour of these measures please write to your local councillors, MLAs and MPs.

You may enclose a copy of this article if you wish.

*John O’Connell is Derry-based author.

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