Dara Gantly asks whether the Government is measuring up to expectations when it comes to alcohol misuse.
I’ve been to the Guinness Storehouse – and on more than one occasion – including once with one of my wife’s relations from the US, who was chuffed to discover that one of his possible ancestors – a Price, Arthur Price, the other Arthur’s godfather – had bequeathed the £100 that allowed Guinness to set up his first brewery. The tour is an enjoyable experience, but I do fell slightly uncomfortable knowing that the country’s greatest tourist attraction is not the Cliffs of Moher, the Book of Kells, Glendalough or even Blarney Castle – but a drinks manufacturer.
The great debate over our love affair with alcohol is never far from our lips, but at Budget time both sides tend to raise their voices, if not their glasses, that bit more. So it was last week at the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, where representatives of the drinks industry lobbied hard to lower excise duty on alcohol as a way of giving the sector a badly needed fillip.
According to Adrian Cummins, CEO of the Restaurants Association of Ireland, excise is a blunt instrument that “unfairly impacts on small local businesses” and does not deliver on reducing harmful patterns, like binge drinking.
Just to remind you (and this is not from the Committee meeting), 75 per cent of all alcohol consumed in Ireland is drunk as part of a binge-drinking session. Some 39 per cent of Irish people aged 15 years and over binge drink on a regular basis, but when non-drinkers are excluded, almost half of all drinkers (48 per cent) report they have engaged in ‘heavy episodic drinking’ in the past 30 days.
But back to the Oireachtas: “It is a sledgehammer, not a scalpel,” added Cummins, on the issue of excise duty. “We, the Drinks Industry Group of Ireland and the 92,000 people that we represent, stand ready to work with government on policies that can deliver a difference on this important issue, without costing jobs in local communities that can ill afford to lose them.”
The response was swift and to the point. Alcohol Action Ireland warned that, with Revenue figures indicating our alcohol consumption was beginning to rise again this year, to cut prices now, as the economy continued to recover and personal spending increased, would come directly at the expense of the health and wellbeing of the Irish people.
It also noted that the alcohol industry’s total contribution to the Exchequer, from VAT and excise, was just around half what the harm caused by its products costs the Irish taxpayer every year, an estimated €3.7 billion – or €3,318 for every taxpayer in the country. And people swallow this, but are marching over water charges?
Source: Dara Gantly, Irish Medical News, 10/10/14
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