It was Sunday the 29th of March 2004: The last day a person could legally smoke in Ireland’s public houses and nightclubs. I was working in a well known establishment in Dublin’s city centre. Just after we finished last orders, the manager pulled me aside and told me that as soon as it was midnight, I was to do a circuit and tell everyone to stub out their cigarettes and take all the ashtrays from the tables and put them behind the bar. He told me he’d got a tip from nearby Store Street Garda station that the lads were going to pay a visit before 1am and make an example of our pub – just to show that they (the establishment) were serious.
Surely he was being a bit paranoid? I also thought that telling drunk people they couldn’t smoke anymore wasn’t a very good idea – that what they were socially conditioned to believe was acceptable was now suddenly illegal… The manager wasn’t taking any chances – I went ahead and did what I was told. As soon as midnight came, I went around swiping ashtrays from tables and pulling lit smokes from very surprised people’s mouths and dumping them all into a metal bucket I was carrying.
To my surprise, there wasn’t any trouble at all. I guess the tipsy drinkers were too shocked at my outlandish actions to retaliate aggressively. Soon after, the bar was empty. The bemused patrons had shuffled out into the night and were gone. The Gardai never came; I had freaked out a pub full of people for nothing. Still, I may have a legit claim to fame as being the first person in the world to enforce an outright smoking ban in the workplace.
The then Minister for Health and Children Micheal Martin was the driving force behind the smoking ban. Despite fierce opposition from publicans and the tobacco industry coupled with threats of mass disobedience, the ban was a complete success. It is seen by many in the political sphere as his finest moment. Micheal Martin took on the powerful smoking lobby and won. The percentage of the population who smoke has been falling ever since.
The Minister for Health Leo Varadkar wants to do something similar with alcohol. He believes that there’s a vast cohort out there who have a very unhealthy relationship with drink and the culture that surrounds it. Four out of ten of Irish people actively engage in what is termed as ‘regular binge drinking’. He wants to introduce a new bill to address this issue.
Minister Varadkar said, “Ireland needs to change its damaging attitude to alcohol. There’s a huge difference between having a drink on occasion with friends, and indulging in regular binge drinking. The costs are huge: from the damage to personal health and to society, absenteeism, the burden placed on the health services, public disorder and violence, traffic accidents, and the associated mental health consequences.” He hopes the new bill will be passed before the general election in order to have it come into being by the summer.
Minister Varadkar believes there are a number of ways to tackle this (perceived) unhealthy relationship with alcohol such as making it prohibitively expensive through the use of minimum pricing. Altering the label of the product itself to reflect its negative effect on a person’s health. Providing detailed educational information resources and restricting the ways that alcohol is marketed and advertised.
Minimum alcohol pricing means that alcohol is priced at 10c per gram of alcohol, this works out at €1 per unit of alcohol. Under the new proposal, four cans of 5% strength beer currently costing, lets say, €6 will rise to €11.20, a bottle of wine will cost at least €8.60 and a 700 ml bottle of the cheapest vodka will more than double in price from €13 to €28. The reality is that it’s the less well off who are more likely purchase cheaper alcoholic products so it could be argued that this is just another tax on the poor.
All products containing alcohol will be required to have health labelling containing grams, calorie count, health warnings and access to public health information. Any promotional and advertising material will also be required to display this information. This may take some time to implement due to the sheer scale of products available at the moment.
Other proposals include the separation of alcohol products in shops. A ban on advertising near buying tramadol 50 mg schools and on public transport. No more price promotions including Happy Hours. No advertising on television before 9pm. Anyone breaching the new laws will face legal action, including fines and jail sentences.
Anyone thinking they circumvent the new laws by taking a trip to Newry for cheap booze will be disappointed as minimum pricing laws are due to come into effect in Northern Ireland next summer.
Is the Government going too far here? Could they make the situation worse by making alcohol more expensive? There is an uncomfortable sense that the Government is getting involved with the rights of the individual, and we Irish don’t like being told what to do. Ironically, their eagerness to ‘do what’s best for us’ gives rise to one of the most potentially dangerous aspects of minimum pricing: criminality. There is already a burgeoning market for counterfeit alcohol and illegally distilled spirits. There will no doubt be a bonanza for the fake booze manufacturers – all at a loss to the taxpayer with more precious Garda resources being unnecessarily wasted. The alcohol industry generates over €1bn for the taxman every year.
One very surprising aspect of these new measures is that if there is any extra profit generated, it will go to the retailers and not Government coffers. Surely this extra revenue could be diverted to areas like alcohol awareness and education? Special medical units could be set up to help those most affected by alcohol abuse with this money. The Government is not raising the tax, they are raising the retailers price, so no money for us but it goes back into the retailer (why?!).
There will no doubt be major issues with alcoholic products imported to Ireland. Will the producers be required to change the labelling on their product just for our market? Or will all imported alcoholic produce be funneled through a vast warehouse somewhere where minimum wagers or maybe jobridgers physically place stickers on cans and bottles? It gets kind of daft when you try to work out the logistics of such a proposal.
Meanwhile Senator David Norris was particularly keen to welcome the new measures by making sweeping generalisations about the less well-off and alcohol. During a radio interview Mr. Norris said, (without a hint of irony in his voice) “I hear people on the wireless saying ‘Oh what about the poor people on the social welfare and they’ll be deprived of their few drinks’ – I don’t spend my tax dollars to buy drinks for people on social welfare” He went on to say, “I don’t think tax is for people to be drinking all the time – and I see them all around my area buying slabs of drinks”. Mr. Norris’ statements indicate that, maybe, there’s a disconnect between the establishment and the person on the street.
Minister Varadkar is to be admired for his attempt to change the often destructive culture of alcohol but maybe some of the changes are simply unworkable and have the effect of reinforcing negative stereotypes about alcohol among certain sections of society. There’s also a chance that this bill will never see the light of day. The Scottish Government’s attempts to introduce minimum pricing have been shot down by the European court who have ruled that such a move is in breach of EU free-trade laws. Despite this, Minister Varadkar says he will press ahead regardless.
Leo Varadkar is right about the availability of cheap alcohol. Bad habits such as ’stocking up’ before going out is now seen as a normal thing to do for a lot of people. Maybe he should be looking at our world famous pub culture and how it has been slowly decaying since the smoking ban back in 2004. Any attempt at minimum pricing in shops and off-licences should be in tandem with an effort to get more people back into pubs through tax cuts on the price of alcohol sold there. No matter what Leo Varadkar tries to do, people are still going to drink, and if so – let it be in the public house. Pubs are where we socialise, have the craic and ultimately police ourselves – that’s a lot healthier than sitting at home binge drinking alone. If this is the way forward, we should tax and not lose but needed revenue to retailers, we are country in need of housing and adequate social supports and that’s something you won’t find under the tree at Spar.
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