In Ireland, every week might be designated Alcohol Awareness Week.
Last week, we saw headlines such as "Women who drink in pregnancy more likely to be middle class", and "Secret alcoholism of retirees with too much time and money", though as usual if you drilled deep into the roots of many other stories of Paddy's misfortune in the papers last week, you would probably find that alcohol had been there or thereabouts.
But the story that perhaps best illustrated the intractable nature of our national addiction was the one about our old friend the Stop Out-of-Control Drinking campaign, and how it had declined to support the Government's plans to introduce minimum unit pricing, a measure which tackles the availability of cheap alcohol.
The measure is also not supported by Diageo, which has contributed a million euro to the well-meaning but unbelievably ill-advised "Out-Of-Control" campaign, which in turn said it was not focussed on legislation, but on changing our attitudes, our drinking culture.
Which they may well succeed in doing, to a certain extent, but probably not in the way that they imagine.
Indeed, there is even a chance that the Stop Out-Of-Control Drinking campaign will have the opposite effect to the one desired by its figurehead Fergus Finlay, when he brought his gravitas to the movement.
Source: Declan Lynch, Irish Independent, 27/04/15
Safer Student Nights
eBulletin
Poll
