The Union of Students in Ireland knows the impact that Ireland’s relationship with alcohol has on the people living in this country – we’ve lost friends and colleagues in alcohol-related incidents. We’ve seen injuries and mishaps which wouldn’t have happened if we didn’t have a drink-to-get-drunk culture.
We aren’t puritans: a night out with a couple of glasses of wine can be great fun, and Ireland makes some amazing craft beers. Meeting in the pub is a part of our society but we do need a change in the country’s relationship with alcohol.
In Ireland, children and young people grow up in a culture where they are bombarded with pro-alcohol messages from a dominant and profitable industry. Alcohol marketing and advertising reinforce the dangerous message that it is normal to get drunk.
That message is at the root of so much harmful drinking, and we’ve realised that when the industry, through its pet alcohol awareness campaigns, instructs us to “drink responsibly” the emphasis is on “drink”.
Drunkenness
There is a consistent trend for drunkenness among young Irish people, and harmful drinking is highest among 18- to 24-year-olds. The human costs are shocking – alcohol is a factor in more than half of all suicides and in 41 per cent of deliberate self-harm – that’s in a context where suicide is the leading cause of death for Irish men aged 18-24.
The alcohol industry, of course, is adamant that alcohol is not the problem – it produces a high quality, legal product. The fault, the industry’s campaigns imply, lies with the drinkers, who in essence can’t be trusted to drink sensibly. The problem is not with the company making the product which people abuse, but always with the out-of-control people who abuse the product.
The use of the phrase “out of control” is typical of the industry’s approach of attributing the serious problems associated with its products on a “minority” who we are told drink “irresponsibly’, as opposed to the “vast majority” of “responsible” drinkers.
This flies in the face of all the evidence and is at odds with the reality in Ireland. The Health Research Board found last year that more than half of 18- to 75-year-old drinkers were classified as harmful drinkers and that 75 per cent of all alcohol consumed in Ireland in 2013 was through binge drinking.
Young people model their drinking behaviour on the attitudes and actions of those they see around them, as well as being influenced by alcohol marketing. They are a product of their environment and we have allowed an environment to be created that is saturated with alcohol.
Souce: Laura Harmon, thejournal, 02/03/15
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