What have all these activities in common? Picnicking with a bottle of wine on Portmarnock strand; strolling down the South Wall of Dublin port and stopping for a drink at the local diving club, which was wont to operate a fund-raising keg on summer Sundays (but probably no more); having a few tinnies while watching fireworks from a hilly vantage point over the city; spilling out of an overcrowded bar in Ballsbridge with a pint on a match day at Landsdowne Road; and popping open a bottle of champagne during a stop-off en route to a wedding reception? Answer: All are banned in 21st-century, liberal Dublin.
Surprised? Then obviously you haven't heard of a recent local authority by-law prohibiting the consumption of alcohol in public. Dreamed up by the people who tried to ban us from gathering in communal spaces such as the front of the GPO (i.e. Dublin Corporation), and first enforced in the capital in November 2000, the law has since been taken up by South Dublin and Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County Councils. Fingal is planning to adopt it in the coming months, thereby completing a Dublin-wide ban on drinking in public.
No distinction
The law itself makes no distinction between different forms of drinking - having a glass of wine with one's family at a picnic, for example, versus guzzling flagons of cider with one's mates on Sandymount strand. As a spokesman for the Corporation explained: "It was felt it would be too difficult to separate out" As a result, all forms of public consumption are banned - with the exception of drinking at major civic and sporting events for which an alcohol licence has been obtained (six weeks in advance) from the local authority.
Now, I'm no big drinker myself and, thus, might be happy to forgo such meagre pleasures as those listed above (all of which, incidentally, I enjoyed in the past year or so, quite possibly in breach of the law) - if I felt perhaps some greater goal was at stake.
Were the law, for instance, aimed at inculcating more responsible drinking habits in us, or reducing underage drinking, say, it might - just might - be welcome. But the law will do nothing to attain such objectives, nor does it aim to. Rather, it seeks to combat an ill-defined public evil known as "anti-social behaviour".
Specifically, the Corporation law states that drinking in public "seriously detracts from the proper purpose, amenity and enjoyment of. . . streets and public places". Nowhere are we told what exactly constitutes the "proper purpose" of public places. However, in the nod-and-wink world of Dublin Corporation, the meaning is perfectly clear.
Young adults
If you're middle-aged and, for want of another word, "respectable" - like one of the city councillors I saw quaffing free Bailey's on O'Connell Street at the last St Patrick's Festival Parade - then drinking in public is fine. But if you're a young adult, and - God forbid - enjoying a few drinks with your peers, well, then it's a £25 fine, rising to £1,000 on summary conviction.
Don't just take my word for it. The Corporation itself readily admits that certain forms of public drinking, which are perceived as less "offensive", are meant to be exempt from the law in practice. As the Corporation spokesman said, no one has been fined for having a bottle of wine on a sunny day in a park, and if they were "that would be a case of a garda going overboard".
This argument has enabled the Corporation and the other local authorities to introduce the law with little public comment. However, it must be asked, is this the sort of law we should be welcoming: one designed to penalise a particular group of citizens - namely young adults - for performing an act which the rest of us will be able to commit with impunity? And it is penalising young adults. Figures for the first year of the Corporation by-law showed 18- and 19-year-olds received more than a third of the 1,700 fines issued, with the number of other fines imposed decreasing with age.
New category
Another objectionable aspect of the law is that it is tending to criminalise young people from an earlier age with 43 youths hauled before the courts for repeat offending in its first year. It is ironic that this new category of offenders is being created by a group of agencies which bears primary responsibility for the lack of public amenities for many of these people (other than a field to drink in).
The social evils which this law might seek to combat - breach of the peace, under-age drinking, vandalism, and so on - are already addressed by long-standing public-order laws. That those laws might not be effectively enforced is no excuse for introducing this discriminatory and hypocritical by-law which, if it continues to deliberately target young adults, as it has done, will rightly generate greater cynicism among that same group of people towards the law-makers of this State.