The story is well-documented: 16-year-old Euan Blair found lying face down on a pavement at 11 p.m., numb with alcohol in his vomit-soaked shirt, abandoned by his friends, in one of the sleaziest squares in London. It could have just as easily been a Dublin scene. According to a new World Health Organisation survey, 29 per cent of Irish schoolchildren had a drink in the last month. Some were as young as nine years old. Between the ages of 15 and 17, the survey showed that 61 per cent of boys and 52 per cent of girls had experienced alcohol. Statistics such as these have prompted a new Department of Health campaign which will focus on encouraging youngsters to delay having their first drink.
But, worryingly, the story of Euan Blair displays the more common, tolerant adult attitude to teenage drinking, particularly among young males. "Ah, sure we've all done it", shrugged the politicians, the journalists and the experts. "It's a vital part of the rites of passage"; "boys will be boys"; "there go us but for the grace of God . . ."; "nights out with the lads are part of growing up". Most people would have smiled a little smile when they heard the news, said Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott. Summing up this extraordinary consensus was the headline: "Drunk and disorderly and perfectly normal". No, not the verdict of a tabloid, but of the thundering Times.
Not a lot has been heard from parents. Rowing against this mighty tide of tolerance leaves one open to "looking like a Holy Joe", said one, or a "deluded idiot". It's "normal", say the opinion-makers - get over it.
But how can it be "normal" for a boy from a caring home to be reduced to comatose prey for every mugger - and perhaps worse - in London? "Ah, it'll be a story to tell his grandchildren," chuckles an indulgent father. So supposing it had been his daughter lying there in Leicester Square, face down and alone. Would it still be "just part of growing up"? And if not, why not? Supposing Euan Blair had been mugged instead of drunk, and left unconscious on the pavement in Leicester Square? "There would have been uproar," says Peter Byrne, director of the Irish National Youth Council. "There would have been a storm of calls for greater policing, for the right of the young to travel through London in safety . . . But the end result was the same. Yet there was no-one calling for the police to do something, no-one asking for the child to be protected from whoever sold him the drink - though the drinks industry had just as surely mugged that child and left him comatose."
But it's that baffling old tolerance again. "There's such a huge emphasis on drugs and parents tend to think `at least they're only drinking' - yet alcohol is still the drug that creates the greatest problems," says Gerry Cooney, clinical co-ordinator at the Rutland Centre. The fact is that "rape" and "drugs" make for much sexier headlines. Yet every day, teenagers are rendered just as helpless by alcohol. And surveys show this to be deliberate - drinking to get drunk is considered the norm. "My main concern," says Cooney, "is when it's regularly drinking to get out of your head. And when that's considered a `good night', that has to be a worry. Our own experience here is of a huge amount of teenage drinking and we'll see the results of it in times to come."
Irish 16-year-olds top the binge picture in Europe, with two-thirds admitting to having been drunk in the previous 12 months. Irish teenagers, in this survey, thought nothing of downing five pints or more a night at weekends. Supt Tom Murphy of the Co Longford Garda said recently that underage drinking was the biggest problem facing the county. And it doesn't stop there.
Teenagers now routinely apply for a driver's licence on their 17th birthday and while the young are known to exercise more responsibility than their elders about drink-driving, the staggering fact is that around a quarter of our annual road fatalities involve young male drivers in single vehicle accidents. The fact that these generally occur between 9 p.m. and 4 a.m. on weekend nights, implies alcohol or drug involvement. Because such information is not routinely passed on to the Garda, no one can say for sure.
Schoolteachers have been saying for years that the starting age for alcohol is being pushed back, beginning with a few slugs of vodka or gin, moving on to securing their own supplies (Smirnoff Ice for the girls, pints of Budweiser or bottles of Miller for the boys are the favoured tipples) in second year. One parent, collecting her 15-year-old daughter from a supervised teenage disco recently, was stunned by the pall of alcohol that hung over the cloakroom queue. A girl had earlier been hospitalised to have her stomach pumped. Photographs taken at a junior ball, seen by the same parent, clearly showed bottles of lager, Smirnoff Ice and Bacardi Breezers on the tables, sold down the hall in the hotel bar to boys in dress suits, who almost by definition were under age. Smirnoff Ice's runaway success was highlighted last week when its owners, Diageo, reported that 250 million bottles had been sold in the past 12 months.
Alcohol features regularly in criminal court cases involving young people - and not only in the juvenile courts. Last year, a south Co Dublin 15-year-old who had drunk at least four cans of alcohol alleged that she had been raped; the accused (one of two boys to whom she had given "blow jobs" the same evening in the local park) was acquitted. This was considered a tragedy for both families, but if the girl had told the court that she had been under the influence of Ecstasy or another chemical, different public responses would probably have come into play.
All this is happening against a background of adult public outrage over the fixing of drinks prices, the price of a pint, pub opening hours, and the widespread demand for more pub licences, with the Minister for Finance, no less, stepping in to assuage public wrath. Contrast this with public lethargy towards the year-on-year hikes in VHI subscriptions or to the air of resignation when the same minister put an extra 50p on a pack of cigarettes to discourage young smokers.
What is it in our culture that tolerates the damage wreaked by alcohol on young and old? Why do we hear so little of the staggering increase in alcohol addiction among the young (up by 50 per cent in the under-25s over the past 10 years, according to the Rutland Centre last year); about the unwanted pregnancies linked to alcohol consumption; about the deaths caused by alcohol-related accidents? Why - when so many of us belong to, or know of, families desperately corroded or destroyed by alcohol abuse - do we continue to regard it as a neutral substance, happy to buy into the notion that responsibility means nothing more than getting a taxi home? Some parents are now trying to introduce their children to the sensible use of alcohol by allowing them a glass of wine with a meal because they believe this approach might, as they have witnessed in France and Spain, dilute the "binge" mentality. But they've been fighting the war on teen drinking with little practical assistance from the State which, in 1999, pulled in well over a billion pounds in VAT and excise duty alone from the drinks industry.
Legislation which passed into law a few weeks ago places the onus firmly on publicans to confirm a buyer's age, meaning that at least there is no longer the defence that teenagers were served because they looked like 18-year-olds. ID cards must now be applied for at the local Garda station, just like a passport, and with vigorous enforcement, matters could improve. But this is not a problem for the Garda alone - it will take public pressure and a sea-change in adult thinking to make sure the spectacle of 15-year-olds throwing up on the streets on Junior Cert night is soon a thing of the past.