A plea for a significant increase in the price of alcohol was one of the key recommendations to emerge yesterday from a forum on alcohol whose chairman described Ireland as being "truly awash with drink".
Cataloguing the devastating impact of alcohol in the community, Mr Denis Bradley, chairman of the North West Forum on Alcohol (NWFA), said that in the past 10 years alcohol consumption in Ireland had soared by 50 per cent.
"Our accident and emergency units are struggling to cope at weekends. Our jails are filled with many who have chronic alcohol problems. Our psychiatric units are filling up again with recidivist drinkers because there is nowhere else to put them," said Mr Bradley, vice-chairman of the Northern Ireland Policing Board.
Mr Bradley, founder of an alcohol treatment centre in Derry, said that while not all teenage pregnancies, violent brawls, car deaths and suicides were attributable to drinking, "too much of it is".
Young bodies, minds and the young hearts of children were not able to cope with the demands placed on them by the amount of alcohol they were expected to drink, he said.
He warned that as Ireland emerged as the second-highest in Europe in terms of alcohol consumption, it was important not to perceive this as a young persons' problem.
The NWFA, which was set up in March 2003 in a bid to catalogue the extent of the alcohol problem in the region, yesterday painted a stark picture when it revealed that one in four patients to A&E wards in the region were intoxicated to some degree. The forum's research also showed that almost 100 per cent of public order offences were drink-related.
Members of the forum, who include vintners, healthcare experts, gardaí, clergy and members the education sector, made a number of recommendations and urged the Government to use the north-west region as a pilot area before implementing the initiatives nationally.
Mr Bradley criticised the Government for its failure to endorse the recommendations of the national Strategic Task Force on Alcohol saying he hoped the body's second report would be endorsed and funded adequately.
"It is unfortunate that the Government has not given this issue the attention and energy it deserves," he said.
Dr Paul Stewart, a Donegal-based GP and member of the NWFA, said a substantial rise in the price of drink was vital if the drinking culture was to change.
"The real price of drink has halved in the past 30 years," he said. "A working man would have had to work for a day in the 1960s to earn the price of a bottle of whiskey, but how long would it take now?"
He said the reason young people were "falling over every Friday, Saturday and Sunday night" was because alcohol was so cheap relative to their disposable income.
Mr Bradley said that when the forum first met in March 2003, "we were waking up to the reality of a nation in love with our drunken image". He said the initiative arose because of the North Western Health Board's growing concern about the issue of alcohol.
