Newly published research shows female students binge-drinking as much as their male counterparts. ROSITA BOLANDspends a night with some female students and gathers diaries of their drinking week
RESEARCH CARRIED out by UCC’s student health department and published in the latest edition of the Irish Medical Journal found that female college students appear to be binge-drinking on a par with male students. It’s no secret that students drink heavily. But how honest are they about it?
I went out on Wednesday night with Clíona, one of the three students who wrote about her drinking habits in the past week. She is going for drinks in the George pub in Dublin with her friend and classmate Sophie Cairns (18), who is there to attend DIT’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) Society’s first student get-together of the year.
One of the other DIT students present is Alice Ní Fhlanagáin from Donegal, a friend of Sophie’s, who comes over to talk to us. Clíona is drinking Southern Comfort whiskey and red lemonade, Sophie a pint of Guinness, and Alice a pint of Heineken. (The Irish Times does not buy any alcoholic drink for the girls.)
I ask the three of them what they considered excessive female student drinking to be.
“Drinking until you’re sick,” answers Clíona.
“First, when you think you’re in the right, but you’re wrong. Then, drinking until you black out and pass out,” says Alice.
“Slurring your words?” Sophie offers. Then she says apologetically, “I don’t drink much and haven’t been around drink much yet.”
Have the girls ever blacked out?
Alice, who is very petite, and who has already volunteered the fact her father’s nickname for her was “Alco Al” due to excessive and consistent drinking in the past, nods her head vigorously.
“I often blacked out. Once I blacked out in front of traffic!” Her friends rescue her. “People don’t tell you how messed up drink makes you.”
They have witnessed girls vomiting not only inside bars or private homes without making it the toilet, but “in their seats in the bar.” When it happens when drinking at home, they say usually the person is either taken to the bathroom or garden and made to get sick, or “put to bed”.
Do they consider girls drink as much as boys? They nod. Alice laughs. “I know boys who tried to keep up with me and couldn’t.”
Alice, who is 22, says she “never drank to get drunk. I drank because I like drinking. I liked the taste and how I felt when drinking – until I blacked out.”
But she says: “Age has calmed me down.”
Darina Slowey (19) is a a second-year Social Care student at Athlone Institute of Technology
30TH SEPTEMBER
I decide to go for one pint today after college. I’m not going out, so just want to have the one in the student bar before going home. I meet a few friends in there so stay for four pints of Fosters. It’s good craic but I have to go home and cook dinner.
OCTOBER 1ST
I don’t drink tonight. I just sit in and watch soaps on TV as none of my friends are going out. Feel good about sitting in for the night but then get very bored, because I’m normally out on a Friday.
OCTOBER 2ND
Go drinking in my friends’ house tonight. I buy a crate of Budweiser in the off-licence and spend the night drinking in hers. I drink all the beer in the crate – about 15 bottles. There are about 20 of us there.
We drink a lot at home. It’s much cheaper to drink in houses, you can drink at least twice as much in someone’s house as you can in a pub for the same money. Have a few vodkas after I finish my beer. Get home at 5am.
OCTOBER 3RD
Feel rather rough this morning. I’m not very happy when I get a phone call to go into work. Spend the whole day dying. Drank far too much last night. Don’t drink tonight after feeling so bad today.
OCTOBER 4TH
Working tonight in the student bar. Finish at 1.30am so have a few drinks in the nightclub after work. Everyone is loaded, so I have a few shots to try to catch up. People can be very irritating when they’re drunk and you’re not, so it’s handier to catch up with them. It’s easier and more craic. I have about six shots – Aftershock, Baby Guinness, other shots. I don’t get too drunk though. Get home at 4am.
OCTOBER 5TH
Am absolutely wrecked today. I’m surprised I made it into college at all. Don’t have too bad a hangover but am just very tired after only four hours’ sleep. I decide to have an early night tonight and just go to the cinema.
This would have been a normal week’s drinking for me.
Clíona Byrne is a first-year journalism student at Dublin Institute of Technology.
OCTOBER 1ST
I usually drink at friends’ houses. It’s cheaper and more intimate. Tonight my boyfriend’s friend is having a house party. I will be the only girl at the party who will be drinking. My friend M will be going to the party with me; she doesn’t drink alcohol.
I’m slightly shy around my boyfriend’s friends, they are really nice guys but I do feel intimidated by some of them. I find that drinking prevents this shyness.
I hate to admit it but I do drink to bring more of my personality out when speaking to people that I’m not fully comfortable with. I have had brilliant nights out with people I am not that familiar with, but after the drinking is finished and I meet those people again, I find it hard to carry on a conversation. The confidence created by drink is missing.
I much prefer being in the company of people that I make friendships with while sober.
The party is good fun. We go first to the off-licence. I buy a shoulder of Southern Comfort and a bottle of red lemonade. It costs just over €10. Out in a club the other night it cost me €7 for a Southern Comfort and red lemonade. There are more than 20 of us. It’s casual and fun until one of the guys at the party notices that my friend M isn’t drinking.
She is bombarded with questions by the boys such as “why don’t you drink?” and “how old are you?” until somebody eventually says “fair play to you”.
She is treated like an alien. I notice that the boys who all seemed to fancy her initially suddenly lose interest when they discover that she isn’t drinking. It’s as if they no longer have a chance of getting with her because she’s sober, and why would a sober girl get with them?
My friend who is hosting the party lives beside a large popular nightclub. The single boys leave just before midnight when there is free admission in the hopes of finding a drunk girl to get with.
As the night progresses I have a few more drinks, maybe five. I don’t drink all my Southern Comfort because someone else drinks it first.
I feel more comfortable after having a few drinks. The alcohol makes it easier to speak to people. However, this makes me feel somewhat pathetic. I’m a very outgoing person, but am I really that frightened to stick out for not drinking? I don’t mind looking different, dressing different or not being popular but when it comes to drinking I don’t want to be left out.
I feel like I have enough towards the end of the night and stop drinking. Everybody is very drunk towards the end. We have a lot of fun but I do feel that M is left alienated.
OCTOBER 2ND
When I wake up I don’t feel my usual perky self. I always find that the morning after drinking I never feel that great. I’m always dehydrated, sore, tired and can never study properly or do my work until the later hours of the day.
Thinking about alcohol makes me feel like I’m being hypocritical because I don’t agree with drinking in volume yet I still go out drinking and drink to the point of feeling drunk.
I think that I have been led to believe that it’s okay to go out and drink once I don’t drink like that every day. I’m now curious as to how much is too much?
Fiona Ní Mháille (21) is a fourth-year arts student at NUI Galway
SEPTEMBER 30TH
No longer do I get the pounding head. No longer do I feel like there’s a ball pressing against the inside of my skull. No more staring at the vomit-splashed toilet with the lining of my stomach floating before my eyes. A naggin of vodka has defeated me many times. As a 21-year-old student, I’ve learned how to handle drink. Or how I should handle drink.
I go to my friend’s house at 9.30pm to “pre-game” – what we call drinking in an apartment before going out. My friend and I leave the apartment after finishing a bottle of €14 Cosmopolitan between us and go to Club K in Eyre Square, Galway. My two vodka and cokes go down well there.
Students tend to “lob the gob” or “throw the lips and the leg” more liberally after a few drinks. A friend of mine knows this only too well, but he recites the “4Ds” anytime he wakes up next to a girl his peers would classify as “a dog” – “It was dark, she was done-up, I was drunk and desperate.” A similar attitude of denial is used by one of my girlfriends – “If I don’t remember it, it never happened.”
OCTOBER 1ST
I feel tired and, for an hour, slightly queasy, but I still make all of my lectures.
OCTOBER 2ND
After marinating myself in fake tan and putting on my face, I meet my friends and go to club CP’s in Upper Abbeygate Street. With just two pints of Bulmers over the night, I’m relatively sober and notice a lot more than I usually do. Like the young gent passed out in the middle of Eyre Square – his friends gallantly step in by shouting “get up ya c***” at him while laughing and posing next to him for photos.
Compared to my peers, I would consider myself a “lightweight” as I can’t drink very much – my limit is three cocktails. I find that it is mostly first-year students who abuse alcohol most frequently as they haven’t yet learned what their drink limit is. Most of them learn that the unmerciful hangovers the next day simply aren’t worth it.
