Drink For Thought

Like, the Celtic Tiger bubble burst, and with a thunderclap to boot. Two bolts of lightning and there it was, gone gone gone. 900 jobs lost at Gateway in Coolock, and another 600 plus in Macroom. Wham bam, thank you ma’am!

Of course, it’s good that so many of the Macroom workers are already in demand. Rightly, I’m sure. But make no mistake, the downturn in America and elsewhere is infectious and, as many warned, when America sneezes, we catch a cold.

There’s nothing startling in this. Indeed, some cooling in the economy is no bad thing. But most importantly, it exposes the crap that en-wretched so much public comment over the last three or four years. Too many people believed the hype, politicians amongst them. And like many, I had enough of that.

Now listen, I’m not a begrudger. Long ago, back in the early ’90s I was forecasting what emerged, talking about a new swagger, a new sense of optimism and possibility. Check the record for yourself. And I was right. What I didn’t foresee was what followed – PD heaven, a new and unfathomable smugness, an arrogance even, with a shift to the right, to intolerance, to bullishness ..

Not us, I thought, but now I’m not so sure. So, hard as these shutdowns are, they have their purpose, to let some of that appalling wind out of our sails.

All that said, there’s a demographic factor at work as well. As we speak, people who sat the Leaving Cert have just accepted university or college places. And there’s less people for more places. That’s the way it is now. Which means that in future, there will be less of us to fill jobs. And there’s only two ways to deal with that eventuality, either we agree to lose some jobs (that we can’t fill) or we encourage immigration. There’s no middle way!

Most other European countries have been through this before us, and they have tended to go for immigration. There’s a very basic reason - pensions. Without workers to fill jobs and pay taxes, future pensions will be unsustainable. So, which would you choose?

Mention of the demographic curve also reminds me of the worthy fulminations emanating from the Patrick MacGill summer school in Co. Donegal.

Oh, there were lofty thoughts. One always acknowledges the honesty and decency of John Lonergan of Mountjoy. But in general, most of them trod the well-worn paths on drugs and drink.

As regards the latter, I am constantly amazed at the one-sidedness of the discussion by politicians, the medical hierarchy and the media. Truly shocking. The impression one gets from Official Ireland is that we’re a shower of drunks, and we’re training our children to take over from us.

Now let me be quite clear. Alcohol is a dangerous drug and many people in Ireland have problems in controlling their intake and behaviour. A great deal of sorrow has been caused. But that doesn’t excuse the hype and cant.

Some of the huffing and puffing is based on an analysis of our per capita consumption. That’s calculated by taking the amount of alcohol consumed and dividing it by the number of people. The figure that results has been rising. And so most people say we’re drinking more, and we’re in danger of going over the cliff.

But are we? I don’t think so, mate. We have the largest proportion of 18-35-year-olds in western Europe, by a very long shot. That’s the age range in which people drink most, everywhere. Almost everyone, except those with an alcohol problem, eases off after that. I’ll bet you that we will too. The reason why we appear to be drinking more is that more of us are in the drinking age.

Statisticians call that a variable and they try to take account of variables when they do calculations, so their outcomes are accurate. Not us. We just do simple arithmetic, and we miss the point. There is a drink problem, but we’re not seeing it. Or rather, Official Ireland isn’t.

Of course, there is a teenage drink problem in Ireland and yes, it really does need attention. But if we ask the wrong questions, we’ll get the wrong answers.

Ireland is a cultural province of the UK now, as you can see from every conceivable medium. Dubliners support Leeds against Dublin City. Papers sell themselves on their coverage of the Premiership. The telly is full of horrible Ibiza fly-on-the-wall programmes following cypher-Brits to see who lays who – and Irish-made telly is just as bad.

Okay? That’s us. All of us. And part of that culture is a very unhealthy pattern of drinking. It’s the same in Scandinavia, even though alcohol is extremely expensive! They binge. Get utterly shitfaced.

But we add our own little bit on top. See, our adult society in Ireland doesn’t like children or teenagers gathering in public. Look at our town planning, look at our law enforcement, look at the attempt by reactionaries in Dublin to limit the right to gather in O’Connell Street some months ago, look at the persecution of skateboarders.

The general message that young people get is this - you can do what you want, but you can’t do it here! Get out of my sight!! Don’t let me see you doing that again! What kind of message is that? So they skulk off to fields and lanes and, in the absence of anything more constructive to do, get drunk. You’d hardly blame them. We’ve all done it in our time, and we’ve mostly recovered as well.

In the Mediterranean countries, in contrast to our British model, young and old come together in crowds in the promenade, the passagiata ... They have a coffee or a coke or an ice cream. They ride their scooters and flirt, young and old. It’s all there in the open.

I remember seeing a crowd of delirious (but largely sober) French students marching around Barcelona with a tricolour singing the Marseilleise after France qualified for the World Cup final in 1998. It was way after midnight. They were applauded as they went, even by the cops.

Here, they’d be sent packing, or locked up.

And in Mediterranean countries, unlike the cold North (including us) drink (principally wine) is a normal part of the food cycle, a part of the meal, not a forbidden fruit. So, young people learn to drink responsibly as a natural part of life.

I suppose we also come to that, most of us anyway, but we have to sneak away and dissemble and experiment and find out the hard way first. And you know, from a health education point of view, regular ‘moderate’ consumption of alcohol is far more healthy than abstention!!

Let’s get to the point. Ask the right questions.

Yo ho ho.