Start Making Sense

We are a drinking people. For all the best efforts of the temperance movement and the prohibitionists, the culture of the drinker has remained at the heart of the Irish personality. It is scarcely surprising: given our geographical dispositions and (eh) peculiar weather patterns, fire-forming and tongue-loosening substances were always more likely to be the drug of choice.

It is no trifling matter. Thousands of tourists come here with the express intention of sampling our legendary pub culture. That and pints of stout and music and crack.

Of course they come for other things as well. Not sun, sand, sea and sex of course, although to be fair, all are available to the true seeker(!). They come for cultural things. Heritage things. Spiritual and poetic things.

Among which might be numbered Mayo 5000, a celebration of that county's long history, and of the remarkable Céide Fields, a substantial settlement which has been dated to 5000 years ago.

You might be lucky and visit the Céide Fields interpretive centre on a balmy sunny day. On the other hand, it might be one of those days when a wind scythes down from the north west, chilling all to the marrow.

On such a day, having absorbed all there is to know about the ancient site, you might be forgiven for repairing to a public house for a pint and a small one. After which you might begin to get into trouble. I mean, if the crack was good, you might down another tincture or two. In which case you'd be over the new limit as contained in the Republic's latest Road Traffic Bill.

There is an irony in this, since a remarkable archaelogical discovery in western Iran shows that humans were drinking wine and beer there at the same time as the Céide Fields flourished.

The Sumerians, who are still regarded as the first civilised society (though Mayo folks dispute this with increasing confidence) were known to drink beer from their pictographs. But during excavations at Godin Tepe in Iran, on the Silk Road, Canadian experts have found residues of wine from more than 5000 years ago.

Wine and beer and subsequently spirits have accompanied humanity from the first tentative steps towards what we still, with reservations, call civilisation. It is tempting to make that association more explicit, and to suggest that without alcohol the path towards the present would have been more jagged and barbarous.

Certainly, the Egyptians drank, as did the Phoenicians of Lebanon, where today Serge Hochar of Chateau Musar in the Bekaa valley makes a great wine in the shadow of the guns: what more appropriate metaphor could there be?

The Greeks were ardent imbibers as were their Minoan and Cretan counterparts. And the Romans colonised the Mediterranean with the vine.

The Irish took to brews and distillations of fermented grape and grain with a will and a way. In the 15th century the town of New Ross was the largest in the whole island, thanks to a thriving trade with France. For several centuries, this island imported more Bordeaux than did our more heavily populated neighbour.

It's in the very marrow of our culture, and has been a constant attendant on the peaks of artistic and cultural and amatory endeavour. We seek it out, even in fermented mare's milk for chrissake!!

And you can feel this in the pub. Hawky and non-commital people become garrulous and unguarded. In those close and smoky quarters our wild and uninhibited soul looses the shackles of convention and circumspection. The humours, the passions, the wisdoms, the stupidities, the lunacies, the longings, the lustings, all are laid bare.

And they offer a communal focal point, a largely neutral meeting ground. This is crucially important for those who live in isolation. But it also matters to the rest of us.

None of this is intended to gloss over the very real problems that attend the abuse of alcohol. Wrong drinking can lead to the most awful results, as thousands, especially but not exclusively women, can testify.

We do not always drink sensibly. Every weekend thousands of people go out with the general intention of getting shitfaced. All sorts of things emerge under the influence, not all of them pretty.

But most therapists will tell you the same thing, that most people with a drink problem have been the victims of one or more forms of abuse earlier in their lives. It is not, in other words, the drink that is the problem, but the satchelful of private terrors that the individual carries about with her or him, and which are liberated by the liquor.

But the new drink-driving law is based, as was the old one, on the presumption that drink - rather than the use to which it is put - is the problem.

The Minister for the Environment of the Republic was quoted in the Irish Times last week as saying that "there is no getting away from" the "absolute certainty ... that you can relate 25% of fatal accidents and injuries to drinking and driving."

But this also means that 75% of fatal accidents and injuries are not caused by drinking and driving! What are we to do about this??!! The causes of the 75% include dodgy roads and dingy cars, to be sure. But above all, they include bad driving. And a bad driver with drink taken is liable to be a very bad driver indeed.

But in contrast, I would maintain that a good driver with a couple of gargles on board will still be a good driver, and unlikely to cause an accident . . .

It is, I suppose, the folly of targetting everyone that irritates me. The presumption that we all grow cloven hooves with a drink or two. Right enough, there is a good argument for a selective law that demands that the driver of any car carrying more than two young men under the age of 25 should not have any drink taken: testosterone and alcohol don't always mix well.

But such exclusions apart, the emphasis should surely be on the development of good car and road use, and good alcohol use too, rather than on yet more prohibitions, and cosy presumptions.

That way we wouldn't have the threat now being posed to rural communities, to the culture of the crack, and to the collective sanity of those for whom the pub is both neighbourhood focal point and community.

And we wouldn't have the norms of the city applied across the board. Perhaps the most annoying thing that emerged from the whole discussion of this proposal was that people would have to make arrangements to be brought to and from the pub if they were drinking. This urban perspective was clearly enunciated on RTE by proponents of the Bill.

What were they talking about? Taxis?? Jasus, you can't get a taxi when you need one in Dublin, never mind in the country heartlands. Do these people have any sense at all?

It's a mean old world at the best of times. The last thing we need is to have our few pleasures further circumscribed by the forces of sobriety. Let us, by all means, encourage sensible drinking and driving. But let us also maintain some sense of perspective.

Or even ... just some sense.