'Thanks to George, we know a lot more about liver transplant: it's a risky, lengthy procedure,' writes Kathy Sheridan
Even for non-fans, there is magic in the old black-and-white footage of George Best jinking towards the goal, making fools of the opposition. He was an artist.
And then he became a piss-artist.
Who hasn't heard the one about the waiter entering his hotel room to find the bed festooned with shedloads of cash, alcohol and a Miss World? And how the waiter sighed mournfully and asked: "Ah, Mr Best, why did you throw it all away?"
George loved that story. It told us everything he needed to believe - that he was still the one in charge, that anyone who questioned the squandering of that fabulous gift for a drink or 20 was a fool. And he had plenty of people to support him in his illusion - the usual sycophants who glory in proximity to free-spending celebrity.
It suits some elements of society to see hard drinkers as glamorous, edgy characters. The worst offenders are the media types who turn them into "legends", the kind who are always "larger than life", wildly unconventional, brilliantly witty and never, heaven help us, boring.
What this means usually is that the writers are heavy drinkers themselves or desperate to demonstrate that they too know a thing or two about walks on the wild side.
What we've seen in the past few days is what happens to the flip side of the legend. Thanks to George, we know a lot more about liver transplant: that it's a seriously risky, lengthy, complicated procedure which absorbs enormous amounts of medical expertise and resources (Best had his done on the NHS) and for which the UK waiting list stands at about 150. And that, startlingly, 75 per cent of those are people who destroyed their own livers with alcohol.
At minimum it puts into perspective the old refrain that "the only one I'm hurting with my smoking/drinking/over-eating is myself".
And we are learning all of this in the week that Prof Mark Morgan surprised no one by stating that Irish children are starting to drink at 11 and 12; the week when the chairman of the Commission on Liquor Licensing, Gordon Holmes, felt it necessary to state the criminally obvious: that youth alcohol abuse in the Republic is now at crisis level and that young people must be taught at school that it's not right to abuse alcohol.
"We have to take the macho image out of young people getting sloshed," he said.
Well, there's an idea for George when he recovers. If he wants to give something back to the system which is giving him back his life, he might consider doing a big school tour, equipped with a few choice videos of himself in his footballing glory and, for contrast, a few showing him hardly able to walk, his eyes yellow with jaundice.
Maybe we could persuade him to drop by the Republic, where doctors are seriously concerned about the number of very young women who are showing up with liver disease.
But if George does the schools, who will do the pubs, homes and offices, targeting the real idiots, the parents who refuse to see a connection between their own behaviour around alcohol and their children's? It's not as though we weren't warned.
This is no moral panic; a superpub could be wallpapered with the statistics. Per capita consumption of alcohol here has been increasing by eight times more than any other EU country. Alcohol here is the most expensive in euro-land yet we're managing to drink 40 per cent more of it than a decade ago. Public order offences are in the stratosphere (since opening hours were liberalised, amazingly) and assaults are up by 93 per cent.
What's going on? Why, in spite of the tough talk from one minister after another, is the situation getting worse? Is it just bad parenting? A clue: the Irish drinks industry is estimated to be worth nearly €5 billion. That's a lot of euros and a wagonload of vested interests to be defended.
A very unscientific poll among local teenagers reveals that their favourite television ads are for Smirnoff Ice ("as clear as your conscience") and Bacardi, the one showing hard man Vinnie Jones wading into a young, cool, sexy crowd.
Guinness is still sponsoring the hurling championship. And as a result of what the drinks industry calls a "sophisticated campaign" which "repositioned the image of cider to make it a desirable drink for the new generation entry-level drinkers", cider sales here trebled in five years.
As for pub and the law, the Minister for Justice, Mr McDowell, has noted how the closure of a large number of bars in Co Mayo for under-age breaches contrasts with how few have been closed in Dublin.
Meanwhile, responsible parents are run ragged steering their teenagers through the dull, wet tedium of an Irish summer without becoming a statistic of some kind. Too old for the Gaeltacht, too young for a job. What do you do?
Well, as Cobh's local authority has failed to come up with any kind of facilities, 20 children aged from four to 15 living on a private estate there came up with their own.
They painstakingly built soccer goals on the estate's green, got together a team and were making a mark in the district league. Early last Tuesday, the local authority send in men to cart the goals away. Brilliant, eh?