Behind backbenchers’ lamentations is the belief it is impossible to enjoy yourself without getting pissed
CULTURES MOVE in slow motion. Thirty years ago, when I was at the peak of my drinking life, it was more than acceptable to drive while drunk. The question of fitness-to-drive was at best a non-issue, an attitude of indifference to the law being regarded within the drinking culture as a badge of honour.
If those of us who were alcoholically active at that time were inclined to think about it at all, it was to evaluate our chances of getting caught, and here the odds were good. In 15 years drinking and driving (1975 to 1990), I was not breathalysed once. I encountered many checkpoints, of course, but these were usually directed at road tax and insurance, which meant that the documented motorist was almost invariably waved on. The outlaw culture of the pub was buttressed by a tacit understanding between the alcohol industry and the authorities that excessive law-enforcement was bad for everyone.
I am blessed never to have been behind the wheel of a vehicle that became involved in an accident, though I was once a back-seat passenger in a car driven by a drunk, which went off the road and ended up on its roof. Four of us were lucky to emerge from the write-off Mini with no more than cuts and bruises.
Compared to today, there were then roughly one-third the number of cars on the road, but twice as many people were being killed annually, ie a fatality rate roughly six times that of the present. Those wishing to create distraction will talk of improved roads, increased vehicle roadworthiness and penalty points, but only a fool or a knave will deny that the change of cultural attitudes has been a central factor.
I do not believe that people then were indifferent to the risks to themselves and others. There was simply a different way of thinking. For one thing, we were more governed by a sense of fate and providence than obtains now. We did not tend to see things in the sociological way that today, due to a particular form of media influence, is almost second nature. A person’s attitude to driving while drunk was regarded as pretty much his own business, neither approved nor disapproved of. If you had an accident or got caught you were regarded as unlucky. If someone got killed, the driver responsible became an object of pity, almost to the same degree as the family he had caused to become bereaved.
Our culture has moved a considerable distance. A drunk driver is now an unambiguously shameful figure and we have had some high-profile cases in which this became abundantly clear. It is widely agreed that, in this context at least, there can be no cultural trading off of human lives for a skewed idea of freedom.
But, as we have again been hearing this week, vestiges of older attitudes remain. The hoary old fabric-of-rural-Ireland argument is still being trotted out to justify the retention of one of the last remaining high-tolerance drunk-driving regimes in Europe.
At the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party meeting the other day, one rural TD reportedly complained that Noel Dempsey’s proposal to bring Irish blood alcohol limits in line with civilised Europe would “ban” people from having a drink in their local pub and “criminalise” a deeply cherished social routine. Let’s get a grip here. It goes without saying that, regardless of drink-driving legislation, people can go to their local pubs and drink as much as they like. Problems arise only if they drive away from the pub having consumed too much of a mind-altering drug with a proven and undisputed capacity, when combined with the driving of a motorised vehicle, to cause injury and death.
At the back of the plaintive lamentations of FF backbenchers is the deep-seated belief that it is impossible to enjoy yourself without getting pissed. A majority of Irish people still seem genuinely puzzled by the concept of non-alcoholic enjoyment. (“What? – you can have fun without drink? – tell me more!”) Across a range of pursuits – sport, music, conversation – our culture insists that alcohol is a sine qua non of full enjoyment. This equation of freedom with a deadly drug has made it difficult for us to see as clearly as we otherwise might the real life-and-death issues gravitating around our misconceived ideas of what it means to be happy and free.
It is difficult to be heard on this subject if you have, like myself, left the bottle behind. Irish society tends to adopt a self-serving dismissiveness towards such interventions on the basis that they “obviously” signify a desire to spoil everyone’s fun. Thus, our diseased drink culture protects itself from the logic of those among its casualties still capable of speaking out.
The real issue, which urgently needs to be placed before our younger generations, is that Irish drink culture is neither normative nor incapable of renovation, that drug-induced pleasure comes at a huge cost, and that sobriety is a door to a different and healthier way of seeing reality.
If we have any responsibilities to the next generation, we have surely a duty to tell them what we discovered when we tried to be free.