I was interested in the analysis advanced on the Letters page last Tuesday by Dermot Stokes concerning drinking and young people. He was responding to a previous letter by Dr Michael Loftus of Co Mayo, who has long warned about the dangers of alcohol abuse in Ireland, writes John Waters.
Dr Loftus had criticised the endorsement of the Taoiseach and the Minister for Sport of the announcement that Diageo, the parent company of the drinks firm Guinness, is to sponsor the joint bid by Ireland and Scotland to host the 2008 European Championship.
He complained in the context of what he described as the "startling facts" about alcohol abuse contained in the interim report of the Strategic Taskforce on Alcohol, which revealed that Irish consumption rose by 41 per cent between 1983 and 1999.
Mr Stokes pointed to a more hopeful trend. Essentially he was arguing that, since the vast bulk of the increase in consumption has occurred in the 18-34 age groups, Irish demographic patterns do not necessarily lend themselves to doomsday comparisons with other countries.
He argued that the fact that the proportion of our population in the 18-34 range is vastly higher than in other countries in Europe goes a long way towards explaining why alcohol consumption has risen dramatically here while declining elsewhere.
"Over the past decade and a half," he wrote, "a massive population bulge has moved into this heavy drinking age range . . . Dr Loftus might take some comfort from the fact that our population bulge is now beginning to leave the heavy-drinking age range."
This "should lead to a move from the dangerous heavy drinking and bingeing pattern characteristic of the 18-24 and 25-34 age groups towards the safer, regular and moderate drinking characteristic of an older population."
Statistically, the picture is precisely as outlined. But the analysis rests on the assumption that excessive drinking, because it has manifested itself primarily in the younger age-groups, is a kind of lifestyle option, a phase the young are going through. It emphasises the circumstantial patterns while overlooking why people drink to excess.
There is, of course, a considerable social phenomenon of moderate alcohol-intake, but this is not the issue. Alcohol abuse occurs in conditions which exhibit fairly clear-cut common characteristics and symptoms. For its abusers, alcohol becomes not a social lubricant or an enhancer of enjoyment but an analgesic and substitute for meaning. Alcoholism, it has long been established, is essentially a disease of the spirit. This sounds abstract, but is remarkably concrete.
Modern society, by virtue of its rational approach and technological solutions to publicly-visible problems, has caused us to forget how relatively powerless the individual is to deal with issues which the society at large feels it has all the answers to.
In the past, such feelings of impotence were offset by a belief in God, but this is no longer an option for many. The result is that without anyone, least of all the individual, being especially conscious of this, human beings have been burdened with bellyfuls of fear, anxiety and sadness concerning things our antecedents regarded as the will and the responsibility of God.
Drugs and alcohol are the most readily-available non-spiritual antidote to these feelings. People who abuse drink or drugs invariably do so because they are seeking to fill what Salman Rushdie called the "God-shaped hole" in their psyches.
What evidence we have concerning the collapse of belief in God in Irish society displays enormous circumstantial conformity with the increasing abuse of alcohol and drugs.
A survey of third-level educated young adults between the ages of 20 and 35, conducted by Father Desmond O'Donnell OMI, and published in the January edition of Doctrine and Life, presented a fascinating sketch of the spiritual outlook of the young.
In general terms, about two in five respondents appeared to have no belief in a spiritual dimension. Of these a significant majority were male, with younger males being significantly more likely to lack such belief.
For example, 5 per cent of males, but only 3 per cent of females, declared an outright denial of life after death, and those between 20 and 25 were four times more prone to such a view than those aged between 30 and 35.
Asked to choose between 12 possible descriptions of their experience of God, the respondents displayed a similar pattern, with the 20-30 age groups being less likely to accept descriptions like "peace", "trust", and "being loved".
Negative experiences of God were more common among males, with 8 per cent of males as against 3 per cent of females agreeing to the term "nothing" as a description of their relationship with God. In general, the worst abuses of alcohol occur among males in their early 20s, the cohort in which belief in a spiritual dimension is most lacking. This is not a coincidence.
And since such unbelief is a relatively new and growing problem, and since alcohol abusers do not suddenly convert to moderate consumption on reaching a certain age, and since experience tells us that God is not miraculously restored to the lives of adults without some profound spiritual transformation occurring, it is likely that, far from dissipating when the present demographic bulge passes into middle-age, our national alcohol problem will continue to grow and grow.