The President, Mrs McAleese, has performed a signal public service by highlighting what she described as the "dark side" of the Irish love for conviviality - "the stupid wasteful abuse of alcohol and its first cousin - abuse of drugs."
In her speech at a conference on Irish identity in Charlottesville, Virginia, which she devoted mainly to Ireland's many achievements in the last decade, she went on to say that these abuses "chart a course of misery and malaise so utterly unnecessary that we need to reimagine an Ireland grown intolerant of behaviour which it has too benignly overlooked for too long." In previous comments, she described them as "unhealthy" and "sinister."
There can be no doubting the validity or veracity of her remarks. As she put it, "more money in pockets has visibly lifted standards of living but it is being badly spent too, on bad old habits that have never gone away." The statistics bear this out. There has been a 46 per cent increase in drinking over the years 1989-2000, bringing Ireland towards the top of European alcohol consumption. Binge drinking has increased substantially among men and women and teenagers are being drawn into the drinking culture. Far fewer people now abstain.
The health and social damage is equally stark. One quarter of all cases in accident and emergency departments are alcohol related. So are one third of road accident - and two-fifths of fatal ones. Levels of violent crime, longer-term illness and absenteeism from work are directly related to this increase in drinking, which economists reckon to be a real drag on growth.
The use of drugs is not so widespread; but, taken together, such a pattern of behaviour certainly merits the epithets stupid and wasteful. It is also pathological, revealing a disturbing psychological obsession and compulsion in many sectors of Irish society which merit much more serious discussion, and political action, than they have received so far.
The President's remarks have been broadly welcomed as a legitimate intervention, indeed one that is above conventional politics. If they help to focus political attention on a social and cultural problem needing an urgent response, they will have served their purpose well. There should be no illusions about how difficult this will be, considering how engrained these habits have become - and the powerful interest groups who gain from them.
Those who argue that Mrs McAleese has damaged Ireland's reputation by airing such criticisms abroad take too little account of the wider changes in our society which she welcomed and celebrated in her speech. It was delivered to a gathering devoted precisely to examining how best to adapt to these changes by reimagining Ireland. The changes have made Ireland a far more open place, indeed one of the most globalised in the world. Such uncomfortable realities cannot be suppressed - indeed they are crisply reported in the current issue of the Economist, which quotes these statistics. Thus they are already in the international arena.