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Posted on 11/25/2001 3:02:32 AM PST by Happygal

Face it, we're a nation of alcoholics and we don't need a task force to tell us so, writes Declan Lynch

THE Irish are consuming astronomical amounts of alcohol. But the Minister for Health is not standing idly by. He has announced a National Alcohol Strategy Task Force "to recommend measures to Government to prevent and reduce alcohol-related harm in Ireland".

For your information, there are now 50 task forces out there, including a task force to examine social welfare payments in Co Louth during the foot-and-mouth crisis, a task force on joyriding in Coolock, and a task force to examine possible regulation of jet-skis, speedboats and other fast water-craft.

This one has a task that is bigger than all of them put together, and then some. It is not entirely true to say that everything bad in this country happens as a direct or indirect result of alcohol, that every Irish person dies either directly or indirectly from drink. But it is getting there.

And yet these figures tell us something we know already. At some level, we know all this. We know, but we do not understand.

If drink was some recreational drug, and it was doing this sort of damage, we would be establishing a task force to seize the suppliers forthwith and to intern them without trial. Instead, for the most part, almost as a matter of public policy, we treat it as a subject of mirth.

It's not as if this vein of dark humour is so hilarious, we simply can't do without it. In the most recent case, we had the plight of Ireland supporters having to stay sober for three days in Iran. Hysterical, huh?

While we laughed ourselves sick about this, we could not understand why the unfortunate oppressed people of Iran thought that we had a problem.

We qualify for Korea/Japan, and perhaps it is not our first thought but it is our second thought: will the pubs be open at seven in the morning? Already we know that the "early houses" are doing excellent business in that truly mind-boggling aspect of the trade, where men get out of their beds before dawn to go drinking, maybe watching an old Clint Eastwood movie over a few scoops at breakfast time in pubs which are allegedly for shift-workers.

I have been in these places and even at the time I was able to regard the scenes therein as deeply strange, if not totally insane. But in general we take no notice, except to hope that every house will become an early house next May.

There will be no opposition to this from Bertie, who brought Bill Clinton drinking pints because pints in moderation are a grand thing. Though we know for a fact that astonishing numbers of people don't drink pints in moderation, and know it well, we don't understand it enough to regard Bertie's photo-op as odd in any way.

We are nightly revolted by those disgraceful TV ads which are supposed to deter young people from dangerous driving, ads in which car-crashes are reconstructed in a way which must be unbearable for any victims who happen to be watching. Especially as the next ad-break is liable to feature a hilarious commercial for Smirnoff Ice or Heineken.

My favourite ad at the moment is the Heineken "pain-barrier" ad in which the bloke at the party plunges his arm into the barrel of icy water. If we had any understanding of our condition, we would not need a task force to tell us that brilliant ads for alcohol should be abolished first thing tomorrow morning.

At the heavier end, Guinness is appealing to the raw honesty of youth by showing them that a feed of pints can make you roll around in puddles, followed by a bit of pushing and shoving with some other punter at the bus-stop. Only then do they add the entirely ludicrous suggestion that this can lead to an impromptu spot of rough sex.

We know that such scenes usually end in Accident and Emergency, rather than in any sort of consensual sex. But it seems that where porter is concerned, we are endlessly willing to suspend our disbelief.

So what do we do except stand in awe of our genius for self-destruction?

We are far too sophisticated to be reached by aggressive temperance crusaders protesting outside pubs at closing time. Indeed we strive for sophistication in almost every aspect of our lives except this constant craving for booze.

None of our celebrities can be heard saying a bad word about drink, no-one apart from Dr Mick Loftus, who is a conservative GAA person, and thus widely assumed to be against all forms of pleasure.

The only Irish celebrities who are other than jocular about the gargle are recovering alcoholics, who can also be safely ignored because they'd be prejudiced anyway, wouldn't they? And anyway, they've had their fun.

The fact remains, we are a nation of drunkards. We object in a knee-jerk style when outsiders portray us as a nation of drunkards, but perhaps the first tiny step on the long way out of this madness is to state it plainly, ideally in the first line of that task force report: The Irish are a nation of drunkards.

True.

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