Last week Health Minister Simon Harris launched a new strategy: Reducing Harm, Supporting Recovery - a health-led response to drug and alcohol use in Ireland 2017-2025.
The strategy contains a 50-point action plan. One is to recruit seven additional liaison midwives to work with pregnant women who are dependent on substances such as alcohol and other drugs.
There is now hard data in relation to alcohol use among pregnant women in Ireland and its impact on the baby in utero and the statistics make for grim and disturbing reading.
In Ireland today, it is estimated that there are up to 1.35m harmful drinkers. This data, presented by Mr Harris, points to the severity of our relationship with alcohol.
This is all the more serious during pregnancy since there are two lives at stake - the mother and her unborn baby. In 2015, UK researchers from the University of Cambridge carried out a study of almost 18,000 women in four countries - Ireland, the UK, Australia and New Zealand. They found that drinking before and during pregnancy was common in all four countries, however Ireland had the highest rates, with 82pc drinking during pregnancy, just 8pc less than the total for women overall.
Ireland also had the highest rate of binge-drinking before pregnancy (59pc) and during pregnancy (45pc).
Source: Patricia Casey, The Irish Independent, 25/07/17
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