Feckers Read Free Page B

movements, which concentrated on spirits, viewing beer and stout as fairly harmless. But stout was still pretty slow to catch on, being regarded as somewhat unpleasant to taste and a poor substitute for the genuinely traditional poitín.
    All this is intriguingly emblematic of the overall drift of Irish culture, which has ‘traditionally’ tended towards exaggerated notions of ‘tradition’, often investing enormous levels of enthusiasm in phenomena of doubtful progeny. It is interesting that the ancient Irish harp symbol was initially used as a symbol for Guinness, registered in 1876, and later adopted by the Irish Government as its official symbol. Nowadays, the multinational alcohol conglomerate Diageo, which has owned the Guinness brand since 1997, has its headquarters in London. Guinness is a global brand, with little more than a sentimental connection to its ‘native’ city.
    Indeed, alcoholic beverages in general provoke in the Irish personality a particular form of sentimentality not directed at any other liquids. Water is taken for granted. Tea is patronized. Coffee, increasingly, is sneered at as an emblem of Celtic tiger excess. But a pint of plain, it seems, is still ‘your only man’.
    Yet, nobody doubts that our culture of alcohol consumption is unhealthy and damaging. Our rates of binge drinking – defined as drinking with the primary purpose of achieving intoxication – are several times higher than in most other countries, with the notable exception of our nearest neighbour. Half of Irish men and one-fifth of Irish women binge at least once a week. More than 100 Irish people die every month as a direct result of alcohol. The average Irish adult consumes twenty-one units of alcohol per week, the equivalent of more than ten pints, three bottles of wine or one bottle of spirits. When you consider that a significant proportion of Irish people – about one in five – do not drink at all, this figure becomes even more bloated.
    When you get right down to it, the whole point of a glass of alcohol is to trick about with cognition. Guinness is not a squash or a soda – it is a liquid drug, a mind-altering concoction. The whole point of downing a pint is to do something to your mind – to reduce anxiety, to increase self-esteem, to shake off inhibitions, and in extreme cases, to achieve a temporary annihilation of the consciousness. A pint of Guinness has a certain iconic appearance, but really it amounts to a container of fluid exhibiting pharmacological properties calculated to relax, sedate, disinhibit or stimulate.
    Perhaps we should be thinking more about our need for such a substance. Why should a culture choose to celebrate these objectives? Why do we take for granted that it is a good thing that so many of us use alcohol to loosen ourselves up and become more convivial, that drink liberates our vocal cords and enables us to talk more?
    The same mind-altering process that relaxes and disinhibits is also the one that impairs judgement, destroys co-ordination, sparks explosive over-sensitivity, induces violent rages and sometimes leads people to arrive at such a dismal view of their existences that they take radical steps to annihilate themselves. The same product that we celebrate as ‘part of what we are’ is also what leads to unspeakable misery, madness and death.
    Alcohol has many consequences the drinks companies prefer us not to think about: death, disease, violence, pain, mental incapacitation. Our culture is ignorant about the long-term damage to be traced in the emotional, psychological and social underdevelopment of people whose interior lives become frozen because of their use of alcohol as a crutch to get them through life.
    Our culture has developed various stratagems to dispose of uncomfortable voices seeking to alert us to the abnormality of Irish drinking patterns. It is hazardous, in general company in Ireland, to say that you don’t drink. Immediately, you have a sense of being