The Demon Drink

First published in the Western People on Monday.

A dangerous quantity of black porter
in the Palace Bar. Allegedly.

Ireland’s relationship with alcohol is dysfunctional, dangerous and destructive. It makes us overlook the inexcusable and give a pass to behaviour that should be completely unacceptable in every circumstance.

But for all that, using statistics that don’t add up does the alcohol moderation lobby no favours. Once one of their propositions is holed, a shadow of doubt is cast over all of them and their entire argument is on shakier ground than it should be. The latest survey figures from the Health Research Board are just such doubtful statistics.

The Health Research Board survey tells us two things that are very difficult to believe. The first is that a frightening seventy-five per cent of all alcohol consumed in Ireland was consumed as part of binge drinking, rather than the moderated sup that we like think of ourselves as indulging in.

We think that we like a little drop of the craythur to keep the cold winter away, rather than slugging the stuff back like men caught on just as the Guards were battering down the door, horsing it back because they need to destroy the evidence but can’t bear to pour the good drop away.

However, the Health Research Board’s definition of a “binge drinking session” is “the consumption of six standard drinks” in a single sitting. Six standard drinks works out at three pints of beer.

If, as an adult of mature years, you drink three pints of beer you will be aware that you are no longer sober. But to say that you have binged on the stuff is ludicrous. Ludicrous. If three pints is a binge, what word do we use to describe the amount of alcohol consumed by many people – not everybody, of course, but many people – at Christmas? On St Stephen’s night, when everybody is home? On St Patrick’s Day? Have the Health Research Board ever been at the Galway Races or the All-Ireland Final? What do they call that level of consumption?

It could be that, as far as Science is concerned, once you’ve gone past the three-pint mark, it doesn’t matter how much more you drink. By this definition, binge drinking is like being pregnant – once you’re pregnant, you can’t get more pregnant. You’ll never be pregnant-er.

But this flies is the face of both common sense and experience. For instance, many years ago, a friend of this column was stuck in London with some friends for Christmas, looking at the prospect of a lonesome Christmas dinner of cheese sandwiches on dry bread. He did what Paddy often does when he’s lonely – he went to the pub, to drink the pain away.

Unfortunately, while in the pub, he choose to mix his drinks. The next day, this young man did not have cheese sandwiches on dry bread for Christmas dinner. He spent Christmas Day being walked up and down the living room by his friends, in the hope of returning his own powers of locomotion to him.

The Health Research Board survey tells me that man did as much damage to himself as a man who drank three pints in his local on Christmas Eve, because they both went on binges. I say phooey to the Health Research Board survey.

We are told that the three-pint limit is the European Commission standard, at which news we’re supposed to – I don’t know, cheer, I suppose. But the definition is far from agreed, as a 2009 paper in the Oxford Journals’ Social History of Medicine discusses.

The definition of binge drinking used to be what we generally understand as a binge – Richard Harris going out for a pint of milk in London and waking up slaughtered in some bar in New York three days later. The authors of the paper posit that the definition of binge drinking changed as society and politics’ reaction to drinking changed.

In the original definition, binge drinking was a sign of weakness. It showed a chap had no grit, would be read out from the altar and die drunk in an alley. This was a moral judgment.

There are have been two moves away from this definition. Firstly, alcoholism is  now seen as a disease, meaning moral approbation of the old school is no longer appropriate. Secondly, the drinkers about whom society is concerned has changed.

One hundred years ago, society was concerned about layabouts who would rather drink than work. Now, society is concerned about young people drinking, especially young women. These are not the same groups, and should not be addressed in the same language.

But where Aughrim is lost is that the terminology has not changed with the public health policy. It would not have been hard to come up with a word to describe the drinking patterns of at-risk groups like young people who have more money than sense. By not inventing a new terminology, the definition appears ridiculous.

Three pints of an evening is not a session – never was, never will be. At risk young people know this from watching adults. So they know they’re being fed a line if they’re told that three pints is dangerous drinking, and automatically switch off when they should be paying attention. The Health Research Board is doing more harm than good in releasing surveys that are fine in a lab but that have no bearing whatsoever in reality.

As evidenced by the other howler in the Health Research Board survey, the definition of a “standard drink.” A standard drink, by this Health Research Board’s definition, is half a pint of beer, a small glass of wine or pub measure of spirits.

I know more or less nothing about the grape, but beer and whiskey I’ve met before. That standard drink definition tells me that three pints of beer are the same as six glasses of whiskey. Reader, they are not.

I wrote earlier that after drinking three pints of beer you are no longer sober. After drinking six glasses of whiskey you may not know that you are no longer sober, but everyone in your company is fully sure that you are drunk and are now in need of minding if things are not to get out of hand.

Whiskey is a beautiful drink, but it should only be drunk on special occasions, one glass at a time. It’s a fine toast at a birth, and a lovely tribute after a death – I seem to remember a tradition of men going for a solemn whiskey after the opening of a grave in the ancient long ago. But more than one is almost always a mistake.

Those St Patrick's Day Government Drinking Arrangements in Full

A source close to the Government has reacted with shock, horror, outrage and disgust at the suggestion that it was good times all around for St Patrick’s Day as the cabinet jetted all around the world to drink Irish porter on foreign soil. The junkets seem especially excessive in the light of the program of austerity currently being implemented by the Government. Is there not a certain irony in the cabinet fiddling while Ireland burns?

The very suggestion was hotly denied by the source close to Government, who responded to a series of questions from the assembled media. Asked if the nation should buy shares in the Molson Brewing Company on the basis that the Minister for Keeping the Best Foot Forward was going to lorry back a small sea of Bass during his St Patrick’s Day trip to London, the source hotly retorted that the very suggestion was a sentiment held only by corner-boys and anti-national interests.

The Minister for Keeping the Best Foot Forward was going to London by ferry to Holyhead and then by bus to the great city. Once arriving in London he was going to sign on straight-away, as every penny counts when you’re working for Ireland.

If, from time to time during the execution of his offices, the Minister’s hosts thought to offer him a libation, it would be just as rude for him to refuse as it would have been for Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II to ask President McAleese why she didn’t put down more spuds for that dinner in Dublin Castle. This was something the Minister himself wondered at the time, and often meant to bring it up with the former President before her own recent run for the Papacy, the source pointedly added.

The source condemned as a “dirty lie” propagated by “bowsies and communists” a rumour, persistent in Dublin media circles for a number of days, that the Minister for Belt-Tightening has arranged to have his tab temporary transferred from Kehoe’s of South Anne Street to O’Donoghue’s of 156 W 44^th Street, New York City, for the duration of his visit to New York.

The source told the assembled media that the Minister for Belt-Tightening is a gentleman and a patriot, a man who has done more for his country than a lot of people the source could mention, and is now sacrificing himself once more on the mean streets of Gotham that Ireland might take her place among the nations of the Earth.

The source didn’t expect the “gentlemen of the press” to know it, as if any of them were to even think about going onto American soil they’d be wearing the orange jammies beyond in Guantanemo before you could say Jack Robinson, being a notorious pack of ne’er-do-wells and good-for-nothings, but the New York St Patrick’s Day Parade starts at the corner of Seventh Avenue and 44^th Street, a five minute stroll from O’Donoghue’s.

If the Minister were to entertain prominent businessmen and members of the Irish-American community, each more eager than the last to invest in the dear little island of green, wasn’t a house near the start of the parade only ideal? No, he didn’t know how Kehoe’s got dragged into it. No, he did not know who ran a tab in there. The source expected that, if anyone had a tab in Kehoe’s, it would be the gentlemen of the press but then, what sensible landlord would ever trust the likes of them to pay it?

The media quizzed the source close to the Government on plans for a trip to Doha. The source smiled widely and spread his hands, like the pope at the balcony of St Peter’s. “Lads,” he said, “what can I tell you about Doha? We’ll be staying the hell away. The flesh is thrilling but the spirits are weak.”

The thaw quickly melted at the bon mot. He was always a gas ticket, the journalists nodded knowingly at each other. The source glanced at his watch, and looked up at the media. “Palace?” he asked. “Palace!” they all chorused happily, and made their way to Fleet Street, arm-in-arm, contented and happy.

Crossing the Grain Line: To Beer or Not to Beer Before Ireland v Wales

Faster than light neutrinos booting along the spine of Italy are in the ha’penny place compared to the stress the immutable laws of nature will face in Ireland next weekend.

For the first time since William Webb Ellis picked up the ball and ran with it, the great and manly pastimes of supporting the game of rugby and lorrying buckets of fermented barley, grain and hops are not only disunited; they are at daggers drawn.

Drinking has always been associated with rugby. Among players, the debauchery reached its apotheosis when Colin Smart, loose head prop for Tunbridge Wells and England, downed a bottle of aftershave at the France v England post-match dinner after their Five Nations game in 1982. Smart’s scrum-half, Steve Smith, later remarked that after Smart had his stomach pumped he didn’t look good but he did smell lovely.

It’s a professional era now, of course, and the modern player is fuelled solely by Lucozade Sport and boiled chicken. But for the supporters, the pints are lorried just as they always were. Rugby has always been a social sort of a game.

And that’s at the root of the weekend dilemma. The quarter-final between Ireland and Wales rises before the very dawn itself in the green land or Erin, and as such the question every supporter must ask is: pint like a savage and stay up all the night, or take one for the team and abjure Friday night gargle?

The young and restless will choose the heroes’ part, of course. Eager young men will mount the high stools like John Wayne mounting his horse while getting set to take on the Comanches – grim faced and determined in the awful realisation that men gotta do what men gotta do. By four the nightclubs and late bars will have inquired if they have no homes to go, and disgorged them onto the pavement where they do or do not.

Then they are at their greatest danger. Ladies will be making the glad eye and tempting our heroes with earthly delight. Some young men may be already insensible, and already sleeping the sleep of the just in gutters or bus shelters. And more will be laying siege to the chippers, hoping that a layer of greasy soakage between the pints already swallowed and the warm cans waiting back in the flat can make all the difference.

For greyer heads, the temptation is to wish the children well, and hope that they do not kick the wing mirrors off our cars on their way home. We choose to sit in and have an early night, in order to rise with lark, refreshed.

But reader, danger just as deadly as a night-club Natalie or a car-park coma awaits, even in the safety of the home. While trapped in one’s lair, nervously worrying about the ancient hwyl that has fueled Welsh rugby to deeds of glory through the generations, a fan may be tempted to turn on his or her television. It may be necessary to distract the mind from worrying about slow second phase ball, choke tackles or that awful dream we’ve been having where the Pink Panther recites from Yeats in the accent of Matt Williams.

Through no fault of his own, the innocent may, by a tragically unlucky chain of events and through no fault or his own, be exposed to the Late Late Show. This can only lead to one thing: a level of fury that reduces the television receiver to smithereens as you smash it to bits with the trusty poker.

But as you stand there among the broken glass and plastic, the righteous anger will subside and the grim realisation will drawn: oh bloody hell, how will I watch the game now? Reader, there will be only one choice. Go into the hall, put on your hat and coat, and go out, out into the night. Rugby and revelry have stood shoulder to shoulder, answering Ireland’s call, for too long for you to turn your back on either now.

Hoarse Sense - The Taoiseach Has a Duty to Engage with the Nation

The controversy over Brian Cowen’s interview on Morning Ireland yesterday is about judgement, not drink. The nation is sufficiently steeped in booze to know the difference between a hangover and a headcold.

Drink isn’t the issue. At the height of the Celtic Tiger, the nation was at its ease on Saturday nights knowing that our Teflon Taoiseach was swallowing well earned pints of Bass in Fagan’s of Drumcondra as quickly as the barmen could pull them.

Fifty years before, Pat Lindsay famously realised that the first inter-party Government was out of touch with the people when he discovered that James Dillon had never been in a pub other than his own and John A Costello had only been in a pub once, and hated it. This distance from pub culture put that first inter-party government seriously at odds with the nation. Paddy likes a pint.

Nobody in Ireland is going to hang Brian Cowen because he likes a pint, a smoke and a song. But what is going to cost him his position and, potentially, his legacy is what is either his inability or his refusal to engage properly with the nation who will sit in judgement on him very shortly indeed. Yesterday’s interview on Morning Ireland was another example of a golden chance to address the people that was not only wasted, but a self-inflicted wound.

Brian Cowen seems to hold the media in contempt on the odd occasion he thinks about them at all. He may very well be correct in his assessment. The problem is that Brian Cowen is not currently in a position where he can decide whether or not he likes the media. He stuck with them. He can’t do without them.

As Taoiseach, Brian Cowen has a duty to engage with the nation he leads and it’s only through the media that he can do that. For the leader of any democratic Government to despise the media to extent of only ever dealing with it at arm’s length is like a farmer despising cows. He can’t do it and be a farmer anymore.

Brian Cowen does very few media appearances and when he does do them he insists of speaking in nonsense jargon – the modalities of the situation moving forward in their totality, and so on and on and on. And this isn’t good enough.

The country is mired in recession, and people don’t know what’s going on. They’re frightened and confused by what they’re reading and the more they read, the more frightened and confused they get.

This is a quote from an Irish Times story last week about Irish bond yields: "The spread between the benchmark 10-year bond and the German bund was 372 basis points this afternoon, while the yield earlier rose sharply, by over 30 points, to a new euro lifetime high of 6.011 per cent at one stage, before falling back to 5.98 per cent at 5pm."

What does spread mean? What is a ten year bond? Why is it benchmarked? How many other bonds are there? What is a bond in the first place? What is a German bund? Is “bund” the German for “bond”? If it is, why doesn’t it have a capital letter like all German nouns? What are basis points? What is a yield?

Ten questions from one sentence. A question mark for every five words. And that is what people have been bombarded with for three years, incessantly, with no hope of respite. Who could possibly keep up?

People want to be told what’s going on in language they can understand. The nation can deal with being in a heap, if we are in a heap – eight hundred years of foreign oppression builds up a certain resistance. But there is an absolute duty on the man in charge to tell the people what’s going on. Brian Cowen is the man in charge.

Brian Cowen needs to treat with the media. He needs to tell the people he leads what’s going on in language they can understand. The best thing Brian Cowen could do this week is to return to the Late Late Show this morning and say the following:

"1. The country is in big trouble, and we’re all going to be cutting back big style for quite some time.
2. Fianna Fáil are to blame for the mess. We were in charge, we should have cooled things down and led the nation, rather than following an international herd.
3. Having broken the country Fianna Fáil are now fixing it. Ireland is still better off than it was in the past, and our position in the EU, the fact we speak English and our attractiveness towards foreign investment means that we can recover relatively quickly if we take our medicine now.
4. I don’t play golf, chess or bridge, go to the opera or put ships in bottles. I like to relax with a drink and a smoke and I don’t think I’m the only one. Not only that, but once this interview is open, I plan to go home to get to the Brewery Tap in Tullamore for a few scoops before closing. If that’s a problem you may express disapproval at the ballot box in the next election. I gotta do something to keep myself sane.
5. On the way to Tullamore I will stop off in the Park to ask the President to dissolve the 30th Dáil and call a general election for four weeks’ time. It’ll be a long campaign to give the nation time to decide as a nation if we want to be fiscally responsible, or if we want to do whatever it is the other crowd want to do, as they don’t seem to have a plan."

That’s what I’d advise Cowen to say. He’s the leader of the country. He has to show leadership. Ordinary people are very scared for their future and need to be reassured in language they can understand, rather than have jargon mumbled at them by a man who’s acting like he’s at the dentist. Their Taoiseach owes them that.

The Morning Ireland interview yesterday was an opportunity to do just that. Instead, he’s made it worse, and given ordinary people more to worry about. We didn't need that. We have enough to worry about as it is.

Bushing Lushing with the HSE

If the current wretched weather has a benefit, then at least it’s keeping the nation’s young people indoors and not out al fresco drinking, which would be their recreation of choice. The rain is certainly doing a better job of keeping them off the sauce than the HSE’s current campaign is likely to do.

You’ve probably seen the ad on billboards around the country. An Spailpín has spotted it on Batchelor’s Walk in Dublin, above the car park in Sandycove and on the final billboard as you’re leaving Longford, heading east. What An Spailpín can’t figure out is what exactly that image is meant to do.

The guess is that it’s to discourage young people sitting on walls, drinking. How exactly it’s going to do that is harder to guess, because that image, especially in its five foot by ten foot incarnation, is up there with Édouard Manet’s déjeuner sur l'herbe as a portrait of bliss naturel. The perfect depiction of a perfect summer’s evening of conviviality and friendship.

Look at the thing – isn’t it gorgeous? Wouldn’t you feel like popping down to Centra yourself for a six-pack and hopping up on the wall along with them? Have you registered how sophisticated the girls are? This isn’t some bunch of nyuks here – these are the cool kids at school, the Fonzes, the Buffys, the Blair Waldorfs.

An Spailpín doesn’t have the figures for how much the campaign cost, and is too stricken in years to wait for a answer through the freedom of information process, but it’s a reasonable guess that the HSE would have blown between half and one million Euro on this ad campaign. And it’s reasonable to ask what exactly they wanted to get for all that money.

Did they want an ad campaign that warns the comfortable middle classes of south Dublin – themselves, in other words – that their offspring may enjoy an alcoholic beverage of a summer’s evening, or do they want to protect vulnerable children from making a very bad lifestyle decision, one which may cost them the rest of their lives?

The sickening thing is, of course, that one single ad could have taken care of both their own worries over Sodhrcha or Uirlis bushing lushing in Herbert Park and the actual children at risk – all you need is a still from the movie The Snapper of Sharon up on the bonnet of a car getting knocked up by Georgie Burgess while Sharon is comatose with drink. You then splash a head across this that reads: “Not alright, Sharon,” and put the contact details about who to talk to at the bottom.

This is a time when the money spent on these ads could be spent on not closing down wards in Crumlin Children’s Hospital. This is serious. Lives are at stake. This sort of stupidity is not good enough.






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