Casual sex, spending, speeding – excess is now our norm and there's no reverse gear. Are we risk addicts, asks Fintan O'Toole in the first of a two-part series.
Here is the news from Ireland this week. On Monday, the Crisis Pregnancy Agency published new research showing that a quarter of 18- to 25-year-olds don't always use contraception when they have sex.
On Tuesday, the Central Bank published a report showing that the increasing levels of indebtedness leave Irish households vulnerable to a sharp rise in interest rates.
On Wednesday, the Strategic Task Force on Alcohol brought out a report showing that Ireland's alcohol-related problems continue to increase and in 2003 cost Irish society in excess of EUR2.65 billion. Alcohol-related illnesses have increased by 61 per cent in a decade, and incidents of alcohol poisoning by 90 per cent.
The common factor in all these reports is that living in Ireland has become an unusually risky business. We are, as a nation, addicted to danger and allergic to responsibility. We weren't always like this. Early in the last century, William Butler Yeats directed his magnificent scorn at the middle classes of Ireland.
He saw them as a dull lot, too anxious for their material and spiritual futures to enjoy life in the present. Their idea of fun was to fumble along nervously "And add the halfpence to the pence/ And prayer to shivering prayer, until/ You have dried the marrow from the bone".
Like all satiric attacks, Yeats's denunciation was a sweeping generalisation. Like most, though, it also had a core of truth. While the rich and the poor could seize the day because they either had plenty to spare or nothing to lose, the middle classes learned to keep a sharp eye on themselves. Yeats could idolise the mythic hero, Cuchulain, who chose a short, glorious life over a long, boring one, but the emerging Irish bourgeoisie was careful, anxious and watchful.
If the poet had been told that the Ireland of the early 21st century would be dominated by the commercial values of the urban middle class, he would have imagined a grimly cautious society. Were he to be resurrected in the Ireland of 2004, however, Yeats would be dumbfounded. He would find a people that has given up on praying and saving, and created a live-fast-die-young culture that would strike even Cuchulain as a bit reckless. At every level, from sex to food and from money to speed, this is a remarkably improvident place. If Ireland is still different from most European societies, the difference lies in the degree to which people think about the future.
The soundtrack to contemporary Ireland is Frank Sinatra singing "Let's forget about tomorrow,/ Let's forget about tomorrow,/ Let's forget about tomorrow for/ Tomorrow never comes". The common factor in so many of the issues that give headaches to those making public policy in Ireland is our incorrigible collective tendency to live in the present tense. Our attitude to money is one example. The Irish workforce takes in about ¤55 billion a year. It expects to keep a decent proportion of that income when it retires. But it doesn't do much to provide for this future.
To have a reasonable income after retirement, Irish workers would need to be saving EUR6 billion a year more than they actually do. That translates into a shortfall in savings of about EUR3,300 a year for each worker. The situation is worst for the middle-income groups that make up the vast majority of the workforce. Very many of us don't have a private pension. The most recent survey, carried out in the early part of this year, shows that just 52 per cent of Irish workers belong to some kind of pension scheme.
Even among the over-30s, the percentage with a pension is just under 60 per cent. For self-employed people, who have the most direct personal responsibility for organising their own financial futures, the proportion with a pension is falling slightly despite the blitz of publicity on the issue in the last two years. Often the main financial provision we make for our futures is debt. By the end of this year, the average Irish consumer will have accumulated debts in excess of his or her annual after-tax income.
The main engine of this increase has been mortgage lending, but credit card spending has also played its part. In mid-1998 the average person owed EUR375 on credit cards; this figure had jumped to EUR629 by the end of last year. Owing more isn't necessarily a problem, since most of us also earn more than we used to. But we're increasing our borrowings at a much faster rate than our incomes are rising.
The cost of servicing our debts in 1998 was 18 per cent of our incomes; this year, it is estimated at close to 30 per cent. Over a decade, private credit in Ireland has more than doubled relative to personal disposable income, rising from about 43 per cent in 1993 to more than 95 per cent in 2003. While the levels of personal debt in Ireland are not in themselves excessive by European standards, they've been increasing at a far faster rate than those on the rest of the continent. Irish personal debt is growing at about 20 per cent each year - three times faster than in the rest of the euro area.
If we go on as we are, piling up debts faster than we increase our earnings, we will expose ourselves to serious danger. Yet, at almost every level of life, taking risks seems to be a national pastime. Whether we're going out for a drink, staying in to have sex, driving along the roads or just sitting in front of the telly stuffing our faces, we have a pronounced tendency to do things the dangerous way. This is, by any standards, a remarkably hedonistic society in which the watchwords of an earlier generation - "Look before you leap"; "Least said soonest mended"; and "Bless me father for I have sinned" - have been drowned out by the sound of millions letting it rip.
Our attitudes to alcohol, for example, are indicative of a wider tendency not to think about consequences. It's not just that we drink more than our European counterparts, though we certainly do. The Irish drinker consumes more than 12 litres of pure alcohol a year - twice the intake of a French or Italian drinker and more than three times that of a Swede. More significant is our inability to go to the pub, have one or two drinks and go home. Uniquely in western Europe, we drink to excess more often than not. Excess is our norm. Out of every 100 times a French man or woman puts an alcoholic drink to his or her lips, nine occasions will result in a binge, defined as five or more drinks. An Italian or a German will have 13 binges, a Swede or a Finn around 30 and the mad Brits around 40.
But the Irish person will binge-drink a staggering 58 times out of 100. Elsewhere, having a drink and staying sober is normal. Here, it's odd. This attitude to drink is also, in part, an attitude to life. We know that bingedrinking involves danger. There are long term risks to our health, but we don't seem to think much about them. There are, however, also obvious short-term risks. Getting pissed may mean making a show of yourself, missing work the next day, alienating your partner. It makes you vulnerable to violence. We know this very well: while about 4 per cent of Europeans report getting into a fight after a drinking session in the last 12 months, 12 per cent of Irish men do so.
Somehow, though, the consequences seem less important than the immediate gratification of our desires. Sex is part of this pattern. In a recent study carried out for the Crisis Pregnancy Agency (CPA), 58 per cent of men and 38 per cent of women agreed that drinking alcohol had contributed to them having sex. Furthermore, 45 per cent of men and 26 per cent of women agreed that drinking alcohol had contributed to them having sex without using contraception.
There has never been a national study of sexual behaviour, but there is still plenty of evidence that many of us have sex first and think of the consequences afterwards. Sexually transmitted diseases - a good barometer of unsafe sex in the era of AIDS - have become vastly more common in boomtime Ireland, with the number of cases increasing by almost 300 per cent between 1989 and 2000. The trend remains steadily upwards, with a 5 per cent increase between 2002 and 2003. While births outside marriage don't necessarily point to unplanned or unwanted pregnancies, the increase in such births from 5 per cent to more than 30 per cent does indicate a rise in the amount of unprotected sex.
The number of abortions carried out on Irish women in the UK has fallen a little over the last two years, indicating some progress in the provision of alternatives, but the annual figure remains more than 6,000 and it shows that a lot of unprotected and unplanned sex is still going on. In the CPA study, 20 per cent of respondents said they did not always use contraception when having sex, and nearly half of them cited the fact that sex was not planned for their failure to do so.
The assumption tends to be that this is a problem of the reckless poor. In fact, there is evidence that the sexual behaviour of the privileged and well-educated can be just as risky. A study of Trinity College Dublin undergraduates carried out by the university's Student Health Service found that 4 per cent of sexually active students were using no contraceptive devices. Thirty per cent of the women and half the men had had a onenight stand and 57 per cent of the women had used the morning-after pill at least once. Five per cent of the women and 7 per cent of the men had had a sexually transmitted disease.
These figures suggest that even among the most privileged elite of young Irish people, there is still a significant number risking pregnancy and a very large number risking HIV. Knowledge, it seems, has relatively little effect on our behaviour. Everyone knows there is carnage on our roads, and almost everyone could guess that excessive speed kills about 150 of us a year. Yet a recent National Safety Council survey found that 70 per cent of Irish drivers think it is acceptable to drive up to 10 mph over the speed limit. These attitudes translate into behaviour. In 2002, 43 per cent of cars exceeded the speed limit on dual carriageways and 99 per cent of cars drove over the limit in 30 mph zones.
Meanwhile, one-third of male drivers and one-fifth of female drivers don't wear a seat-belt. Not wearing a seat-belt is, in many respects, a metaphor for our culture. We value spontaneity above planning, impulse over rational choice. We celebrate our capacity for careless rapture and mock the glum Europeans who don't know how to have a good time. We are determined to have fun even if it kills us. Too often, it does.