Stop out of control drinking

martingriff wrote: »

The cost of keeping those people in jail/hospital maybe they will have to go to court. Medical bills for themselves or those they could hurt eg drunk driving crashes. Its not just the paying of the guards or hospital staff.

hatrickpatrick wrote: »

Raise young people with fewer inhibitions, and they won't feel the need to use mind altering substances to rid themselves of those inhibitions.
I wish I didn't have to have a few drinks on board to feel confident. But from what I've seen, this is something which is set in stone during childhood and is almost impossible to change later on. Ask most young people why they want to get locked and they'll tell you it's because they don't find chatting up members of the opposite sex as mortifying if they're piddly eyed.

I consistently fail to understand why this root cause of the desire to get locked is almost never raised in the public discussion around booze. Ireland has an absolutely horrible level of social and sexual repression, one which only becomes apparent once you've spent some time in another country with people who don't have that repression.

Calina wrote: »

Well, I don't know if you've spent any time in our A&E services lately but at the weekend's in particular, a good lot of their workload is alcohol related.

Match that with the wait times in A&Es. Ultimately, it's likely our health care issues would be significantly reduced if we did not have to deal with alcohol related issues. In other words. the load placed on A&E by alcohol has a net impact on people with injuries who have not been drinking because their waiting times are going through the roof.

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I lived outside Ireland until 1999 and when I came back, there was a poster campaign running along the lines of "I've sick of being let down" and "It was a great night, I can't remember a thing" and personalising some things like the impact on taxi drivers of puking customers, the absolute yukkiness of cleaning the city after the weekends, the impact on families.

I was working in a bank for a short while and yes people did say things like "oh yeah, last year's Christmas party; must have been fantastic, can't remember a thing about it". I found this shocking. But not as shocking as Irish colleagues who had only ever lived in Ireland found the idea that you could go out for a few drinks after work on a Friday and not get trashed.

In my opinion, there is an issue with alcoholic consumption in Ireland. Being mid table doesn't mean there isn't in Ireland, only that some places are worse again.

This doesn't mean we can sit back and say "yerra it's grand". Put simply, many people in the country like alcohol a little too much and haven't the self awareness to recognise it.

conorh91 wrote: »

The excise duty on alcohol comes to about 1 billion. I'm not sure what the VAT is, probably about the same. That's two billion.

The cost of alcohol to society is about 3.7 billion euro.

Now it is certainly true that some of that 3.7 billion comes back in the form of revenue, but here's the issue. If people weren't going mad on booze, it isn't true to say they'd be doing nothing with that money they saved. Disposable income, if not spent on alcohol, would likely be spent on less harmful pursuits like clothing, eating out, purchasing a car, whatever. That's how disposable income works. It wants to be spent somewhere, anywhere.

Also, even if alcohol consumption 'paid for itself', it would mean that there were no net VAT benefit accruing to the Exchequer such as happens with the sale of furniture, coffee, newspapers, machinery -- everything. Why should alcohol not be expected to contribute to the State?

In short, the excessive consumption of alcohol doesn't seem to pay for itself, doesn't benefit the State, but we should be glad that some of the costs are recouped, even if they are insufficient.