A few weeks ago this column told you about findings from the Rotunda Sexual Assault Treatment Unit (SATU) showing that women were arriving at the Dublin hospital with alcohol levels so high that the only other place such levels were ever seen was in the coroner's court.
This evidence was subsequently presented by Dr Mary Holohan, director of the unit, to a Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health and Children, which is investigating the incidence of alcohol-related problems turning up in accident and emergency departments. She told them that 60 per cent of the women turning up at the unit have been drinking alcohol. Many needed to believe that their drinks were "spiked", when actually they had just been drinking too much.
Dr Holohan suggested that shocking TV ads about the effects of alcohol poisoning may help to discourage deliberate drunkenness.
The last time I was covering the activities of an A&E department, the nurses their suggested an even better idea. A&E departments should offer school tours, where young people can see other teenagers as young as 12 comatose, soiling themselves, vomiting and being given life support.
One of the most frightening phenomena I witnessed was in an A&E department where it was known that casualties could always be expected from a particular teenage disco, where, by 8 p.m, some 14-year-olds were so drunk that they were in danger of choking to death on their own vomit. And these irresponsible children were taking up valuable resources while grandmothers, who had lived all their lives in support of their own families, had to lie on trolleys in the corridors.
A representative of the vintners' lobby said on RTÉ Radio 1, in response to the Oireachtas committee, that such alcohol-poisoning was really the responsibility of parents. The children concerned were drinking at home and on the street, not in pubs. It is true that some parents don't know where their children are or what they are doing, but it is also true that alcohol is too widely available. It's not good enough to blame parents - who may be as vulnerable to our alcohol-saturated culture as children are.
