Hollywood invented teenagers. Sometime in the 1950s a bright spark in marketing spotted a ready bunch of consumers with time on their hands and money in their back pockets. Fashion, film and music products flourished as a result of the invention. A target market was born.
Half a century on, politicians are reaping the benefits of that long-ago insight. The cash for products barter that gave Americans between 13 and 19 a whole new image is in danger of being reduced to a set of stereotypes in which no one but the bureaucrats gain.
The spin feeds off parents' anxieties and fuels age-old fears about how the world is changing, for the worse. But it does so without causing adults to endure the unpleasant consequences of questioning their own behaviour. You can worry and condemn, without ever having to point the finger at yourself.
The specifically Irish dimension to this First World phenomenon relies on the twin fears of sex and drink. Irish teenagers were revealed in February to be the biggest binge drinkers in Europe. The news was serious, but hardly surprising given that Irish adults are also partial to occasional excess. Irish history is punctuated by calls for temperance, and by icons who faced the scourge of addictive behaviour, from Matt Talbot to Phil Lynott.
The news gave politicians a ready-made opportunity to appear to be doing something, without challenging the status quo. Micheal Martin and his Department of Health launched a series of strategies designed to allay parents' fears.
THIS week, his turf wars with Minister for Justice John O'Donoghue bore some fruit with the announcement that plans to deregulate the off-licence sector would be accompanied by measures to tackle under-age drinking and to minimise the risk of making the problem worse.
A key element involves attempts to support and educate parents about their children's drinking. Not about their own.
Without saying so directly, the preferred line challenges the behaviour of citizens who are not voters, and as a result de-emphasises the behaviour of voters and lobbyists who want everything to change except the way they drink.
No necessary connection is accepted between the culture of drink within which Irish children grow up, and the effect on their own drinking habits - even though it seems obvious.
No challenge is made to the noticeable tendency towards addiction that makes more than one in 10 Irish people dependent on alcohol at some stage in their lives.
If deregulation happens, as it will in some form, no plans are published as yet to anticipate the exponential increase in marketing and advertising. In other words, the pull factors will increase without any balancing push factors, except for under-age teenagers. And if age cards are more widely used, publicans can hope to wriggle off the legal hooks.
The quid pro quo for deregulating the sale of alcohol must involve better regulation of how alcohol is marketed and advertised, and of the sites where ads and promotions happen. Yet, rather than challenge the dominance of the alcohol industries and the resulting practices of adults who drink, the spin is to demonise teenagers by targeting them as the main problem group.
The rite of passage from childhood to maturity has always caused concern, and provoked strange responses. So the spin works because it speaks to age-old fears and cultural habits. Even "sophisticated" cultures aren't immune against those myths. The young are feared for their youth, their ebullient energies, and for the choices and sexuality implied. Their future is before them; for some, that's a source of envy.
The rites of passage Irish teenagers face are considerably less dramatic now, replaced by educational tests such as the Junior and Leaving Certificates. Irish teenagers are probably the best educated, hardest working and most motivated generation the country has yet produced.
BUT because Ireland Inc is intimately branded by the alcohol industries, using drink has itself become a rite of passage.
Drinking is a test of Irishness, and maturity. The practice of getting out of your head, as often as possible, draws tourists to the country, as well as drawing citizens into zoned recreational areas where they measure their leisure by the amount they can drink.
The language of advertising and marketing plays on those cultural features, singing sweetly as a siren's song given the rates of alcohol addiction across the population. Saying this is so does not mean following in the steps of Father Matthew or denigrating the pleasure of using alcohol well.
Teenage binge drinking needs changing, but not at the expense of ignoring the mote in everyone else's eye.
The pound of flesh that Irish health and healthcare providers deserve from alcohol deregulation means squeezing lobbies much more powerful than the under-aged. Hollywood myths are fine for Hollywood. Deregulation, however, is all about real life.
mruane@irish-times.ie