If you wanted to know why all the legislative changes proposed last week by the Government will have very little impact on Ireland's alcohol crisis, all you had to do was listen to Michael McDowell on RTE radio's Saturday View, writes Fintan O'Toole.
The Minister for Justice, who used to be one of the straightest talkers in Irish politics, was not speaking directly about alcohol. He was asked about the series of photographs published in the Irish Independent last Friday, showing heroin-users shooting up in broad daylight in Dublin city centre, just beside a group of gardaí.
Rodney Rice raised an idea put forward by the country's leading provider of welfare services for drug-users, the Merchants Quay Project: that safe, clean rooms should be provided where homeless heroin addicts can shoot up.
At first, Michael McDowell sounded rather like his old self, putting intelligence ahead of hysteria. He seemed to accept that it is complete idiocy to encourage heroin-users to exchange dirty needles for clean ones and then send them back out on the streets to shoot up.
Controlled injection rooms, the Minister said, "might be an idea, because I know it has been suggested . . . The question you have to ask yourself is, is it good enough simply to give needle exchanges, to exchange needles, new needles for people to stop the spread of AIDS without at the same time giving some facilities? What do you expect people who pick up needles to do?"
Transcribing spoken words like this makes them seem much less clear. Listening to Michael McDowell, there was no doubt about what he was actually saying: that, at the very least, the idea of injection rooms seemed sensible and ought to considered. Just to make sure, though, Rodney Rice put the question to him again: "Do you support this, and is this something you can, as Minister, allow to happen?"
And then you could almost hear the alarm bells ringing in Michael McDowell's head. Flashing before him were headlines like "McDowell Says Junkies Can Shoot Up" , "Minister To Spend Taxpayers' Money On Junkie Hotel", "Justice Minister Says It's OK to Break Law".
So he shifted rapidly into reverse: "I would be very, very loath to have official injection rooms . . . I don't think that's a good idea, no. It's an indictable offence to have heroin . . . I'm not going to go down the road of providing places for people to shoot up heroin."
Within the space of a minute, and in the mouth of a man who prides himself on his forthright conviction politics, the provision of injection rooms had gone from being a good and entirely logical idea to being a bad idea, a subversion of the law and a suggestion that is not worth considering.
Never mind that there are now an estimated 14,450 heroin-users in the Republic, of whom 12,456 are in the Dublin area. Never mind that there is a strong interaction between heroin use and homelessness, with some people becoming homeless because of drug use and some homeless people using the drug to escape their misery.
Never mind that gardaí know there is very little point in arresting homeless drug-users unless they can be treated and that the State has fewer than 200 residential detoxification beds. Possessing heroin is a crime, so the State can't behave rationally and people will continue to shoot up on the streets of our capital city.
This pathetic little vignette tells us two things that are relevant to the Government's response to the alcohol problem. One is that even the most self-confident of our rulers are terrified of speaking their minds and saying what they know to be true. The other is that given a choice between confronting reality and waving a law in our faces, they will reach for the statute books every time.
We, of all countries, should know that there is a vast gulf between what the law says and what people do. We existed for far too long in a culture which confused the tackling of problems with the passing of laws. We dealt with marital breakdown by outlawing divorce. We dealt with sexual behaviour that was not officially approved by banning condoms. We don't have an abortion problem because abortion is illegal, even though we have a very high abortion rate. We pretend that we can deal with the problem of homeless heroin addicts by having the Minister for Justice instruct the Garda to arrest them.
And our rulers are still addicted to this pseudo-fix. We'll deal with drunkenness by passing laws which make it illegal to be drunk or to serve drink to someone who is drunk. We'll pretend that gardaí are going to be outside pubs with video cameras while their plainclothes colleagues are inside listening for slurred speech. We'll pass more laws that no one has either the intention or the capacity to implement.
Given how easily we slip into a delusory relationship with reality while perfectly sober, spending all that money to get at our heads seems a terrible waste.