Irish People Have Low Self Esteem

Sulla Felix wrote: »

Load of bollix. How can you be emotionally damaged by shít that happened before your grandparents were born ffs.

me wrote:

Nobody ever seems to talk about root causes when it comes to binge drinking. The simple fact is that young people get locked mainly so as they can cast aside the extreme and abnormal national social inhibition which has been fostered on repeated generations of Irish people. Alcohol allows them to temporarily shut down the voice in their head which says "don't say hi to that girl, you'll probably make an idiot of yourself", or "don't talk to those people, you'll probably annoy them". We have a severe national shyness - illustrated to me by an extremely attractive Turkish girl I met in a nightclub last year who pondered why Irish guys would never approach her, and why those few who did always had to be hammered out of it first. Ask actual young people why they binge drink, and the most common answer is because it gets rid of their inhibitions, their in-built lack of self confidence and irrational shame which leads them to severely undervalue themselves both socially and sexually.

I'm not blaming the Church as many do, that's too easy an answer. It's a national, cultural phenomenon which in my experience is unique to Ireland, whereby the idea of leaving one's comfort zone on a night out and meeting new people - the main focus of going out in most other Western countries - is a scary concept which requires a gigantic social crutch to be contemplated. My eyes were only opened to this after several trips abroad, on which I discovered that this extreme level of inhibition common to most Irish young people is not norma as I had once believed, but in an international context, incredibly bizarre.

People in other countries don't drink like we do because people in other countries don't have hangups about social interactions which require a desensitizing drug to overcome.