Alcohol contributes to short-term memory loss. Under its influence, people tell the same stories over and over, forgetting that we've heard it all before.

For example, there's the story about the Minister for Health and Children launching a National Alcohol Awareness Campaign. The overall message of the campaign, he says, is that "less is better".

He talks of the need for "a radical change in our attitude to alcohol consumption". He declares himself "confident that this campaign will ultimately contribute to a change in behaviour." The Minister is Brian Cowen, on April 20th, 1998.

Almost three years later, his successor, Micheal Martin, gets saturation coverage for the launch of the National Alcohol Awareness Campaign. Admittedly, this time the slogan isn't "less is better". It's "less is more".

As shocking proof of the damage that imbibing too much rhetoric about alcohol can do to brain cells, no one seems to remember that we've heard it before.

Brian Cowen launched his campaign on the basis of the National Alcohol Policy published by his Department in 1996, which estimated the cost to the State of alcohol abuse at £325 million a year.

Launching his campaign this week, Micheal Martin put the cost in 1999, the year after Brian Cowen's initiative, at a staggering £1.7 billion. He also announced that figures to be released next week will show that Irish young people are now the heaviest drinkers in Europe.

Clearly, the last campaign ended up sprawled in the gutter. What are the chances that the new one will walk a straight line to sober success? This time Micheal Martin has a secret weapon, a website aimed at young people and called coolchoices.ie. You know it's aimed at young people because it uses the word "cool" a lot and substitutes "wanna" and "gonna" for "want to" and "going to".

It has little cartoon morality tales like the one about Nuala who loses her J-1 visa for the US because she gets drunk and walks on the roof of a parked car. Just as young people in the 1970s used to get high and watch the 1930s anti-marijuana propaganda film, Reefer Madness, Nuala's lost visa will undoubtedly have them rolling around the floor at many a teenage drinking session.

The funniest part of the site is a list of alternatives to drinking your brains out. Why not try Fianna Fail's answer to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: who needs judo, karate and kick-boxing when you can visit a site dedicated to promoting lost Celtic combat skills? Or drop that Red Bull and vodka and enter the sexy world of making your own fishing flies.

If the issues at stake were not so serious, this kind of goofy, Father Trendy naivety would be almost charming. But when alcohol abuse by young people is a major factor in violent crime, unwanted pregnancies, homelessness, ill-health and drug abuse, it goes beyond a joke.

Under-age drinking is not new. Neither, though, is the strange mixture of hysteria and hypocrisy that surrounds it. What needs to be asked is not why Irish teenagers drink but why they drink in mad binges. In many continental European societies, young people start drinking alcohol earlier than they do here, but they also drink more responsibly.

The real problem is not that Irish youngsters drink, but that their parents have not managed to create a culture in which the pleasures of alcohol are contained within a healthy social framework.

The easy scapegoat for our problem is advertising. It may well be that the sexy ads and sports sponsorship create an environment in which alcohol abuse is glamorised. There may be a case for restricting the advertisement of drink, but the effect should not be exaggerated.

If the presence or absence of advertising was the crucial factor in the consumption of mind-altering substances, the demand for cannabis, ecstasy, heroin and cocaine would not be rampant. Just because we don't have the Ecstasy All-Ireland Hurling Championship doesn't mean that the consumption of E is minimised.

The biggest two factors, surely, are money and hypocrisy. If young people are drinking more, it's because they have more to spend. The insatiable demand for labour means that huge numbers of school students are working nights and weekends and bringing home significant sums to be spent on clothes, entertainment and drink.

Enforcement of the labour laws and further restrictions on the hours school students can work would certainly do more to control teenage drinking than pushing the alternative attractions of fly-tying.

At the same time, there needs to be an acceptance of reality. Teenagers drink, always have and always will, yet the law maintains the pretence that they don't, even while a blind eye is turned to the flagrant promotion of organised Junior Cert celebration binges.

The only real effect of the pretence is to place teenage drinking in a no-man's-land beyond the pale of responsible social norms. Should we be surprised that teenagers then see it as a realm of attractive excess in which the only point of drinking is to get drunk?

Countries such as France, Spain and Italy don't share the Irish and British problem of teenage drunkenness because they treat alcohol as a normal part of life. Young people learn to enjoy a drink in the home, with food, with the family.

As in so many other areas of life, we show our superiority by maintaining an illusion that satisfies us but leaves our young people to find their own way through the sometimes dangerous realities.

Unless we cure ourselves of that addiction, the 2004 National Alcohol Awareness Campaign will be launched with a familiar hangover of clouded memories, hazy regrets and dewy-eyed protestations that this time we really will give up the hard stuff.