Patrick Kavanagh said it well of an affair he once had:

“On Grafton Street in November we tripped lightly along the ledge
Of the deep ravine where can be seen the worth of passion’s pledge,
The Queen of Hearts still making tarts and I not making hay -
O I loved too much and by such is happiness thrown away”.

Another wise man put it less poetically but none the less insightfully in pointing out that it’s not the hating that gets to you; it’s the loving. For quite some time now Ireland has been having a torrid love affair with the drink, an affair that is passionate and exciting and reckless and that is most likely to change until the affair loses some of its sheen or until we find another lover.

During the last few years there have been a number of high profile reports showing that Ireland sits at the top of the European table of heavy drinking. Per head of population we consume more alcohol than any other country in Europe and if you want to examine where we sit in the world table then you will find that we are not all that far from topping the league. Within the various reports there is an increasing acknowledgement of the human price that is now being paid for that level of drinking and the price that will be paid in the future.

In all the studies I have referred to there are two common themes. The first is that there is a direct relationship between the year-to-year increases or decreases in the alcohol consumption level and the year-to-year increases or decreases in deaths from a variety of causes where alcohol is involved. They all point up the reality that when you increase the amount of alcohol drunk in a country then you increase the amount of harm done to the population of that country. Decrease the amount of alcohol drunk in a country and you decrease the amount of harm to the population. In the last ten years or so, as it became the fastest growing economy in Europe, Ireland has had the highest increase in alcohol consumption among all the EU countries.

The harm and damage that results across the complete spectrum has increased proportionately. Injuries and personal harm have increased, relationships have been damaged or destroyed, violence in public places has got scary, mental health problems are on the rise and the cost, financially and socially, keeps increasing. I am not going to burden you with all the statistics and the horror stories because I think it was captured in typical Irish fashion by a Gardai I met in Sligo recently who said ‘Take the drinking out of it and I’m not sure there would be a job left for me at all’.

The second theme moving through many of the reports published recently is one to do with culture. One of those reports, maybe the best of them, issued by the Department of Health and Children in Dublin in 2002 and called the Strategic Task Force on Alcohol says that the amount of harm that results from each litre of alcohol drunk varies from one end of Europe to another. They are pointing out that as well as the amount drunk, the patterns and the culture around drinking are also important and I quote ‘This kind of finding often brings suggestions and even campaigns, the report says, to change a nation’s drinking culture, for instance to resemble the characteristic drinking patterns of southern European ‘ wine cultures’. But the experience has been, instead, that in a given culture the characteristic drinking patterns are deep-rooted and resistant to change; when new drinking habits are encouraged, they often add onto the old ones, rather than replacing them. Examples of a successful shift in a national drinking culture to less problematic drinking are few indeed’ The findings are that, while attention to drinking patterns may be worthwhile, it is not a substitute for a focus on the general level of consumption on a population.

I agree with the thrust and the sense of that argument and I am convinced that if we are ever to seriously and effectively counteract the already alarming and growing problems that we have with alcohol, then we are going to have to focus on reducing the amount of alcohol we drink in this country. I am a believer in politics and convinced of the power of legislation to define and refine the behaviour of citizens of any country. If we are going to reverse the upward trend of alcohol consumption and the obvious levels of harm that are resulting, then it is going to take a great amount of political will and tough legislation for that to be achieved.

I am delighted and impressed that the broad political debate, focusing on economics and legislation, has been led and informed by research that is so thorough and compelling, both in its data and presentation, that it is nigh impossible to ignore. I am saddened by the fact that nearly all the research and the resulting knowledge is coming from across the border, from the Republic, and that apart from some rather outdated material we have little or no knowledge of what is happening here in the north. The substantial debate is also happening down south and we have little or no part in it.

Here in the north, we have, with the last few years, combined illicit drugs with alcohol in our policy documents and procedures and have allowed the drugs to take the limelight and the money away from the alcohol problem. But at least the debate is happening somewhere on the island and it is informing and challenging those of us who are sidelined. It is a debate that is now well-informed and based on sound and solid data. It is that data and that research that I am mostly borrowing from to inform this talk. I am making an assumption that there is not that much difference between how Donegal and Derry drink and while Belfast may be a distance from Cork I am assuming that they are pretty close in drinking terms.

Governments, of course, can always ignore even the most convincing research but at least they must do so now with an uneasy conscience. I am somewhat bemused, however, if not completely surprised at the readiness to underplay and avoid the cultural aspects of drinking. Culture is such a difficult word to define and almost impossible to describe. As the world grows smaller, in travelling terms, and accessibility and crossover increases as a result of the communication revolution, then cultural integrity, as something distinct and identifiable, becomes all the more difficult. But because something is difficult is surely not a reason for ignoring it. Perhaps, indeed, the opposite! Culture is an important part of the substance of all our lives and of all the levels of our lives, from the material through the intellectual and the spiritual. It is inadequately, but not improperly, understood as the image or sense we have of ourselves as a people. It would seem to me as extremely important that we have knowledge of ourselves, our history and the factors and the experiences that have constituted and informed that culture and self-image.

For decades we had struggled to grow away from the colonialism and the unresolved political fractures that still continue to dog us and perhaps during the sixty or seventy years of relative poverty and obscurity the only things we could look to, as a source of pride and contribution to the world, was our Diaspora, our emigrants, and a few world-renowned writers.

We always had a strand of problem drinkers and alcoholism in our history, which became even more pronounced in our Diaspora, but we also had a very great number of our people who were teetotal and lifelong non-drinkers. That portion of non-drinkers remains high to the present day. Figures published in the last month show that almost twenty three per cent of the population still do not drink. Despite that seam of problem drinkers we were a low-alcohol consumption country and came far down the European and world league of consumption. We had our problems, but they were proportionate to our history, our economy and the perennial nature of addiction. And then in the nineties it took off. The Irish economy boomed and so did our drinking. Within ten years the amount of alcohol we drank increased by fifty per cent and we jumped from near the relegation zone to the top of the premier division. And the research has proven true and accurate. The latest investigation shows that the harm related indices put us out front in all the damaged areas. Ireland has truly found itself awash with drink.

Many commentators equate the boom in drinking with the boom in money and while I have little doubt that there is a big and important connection, I refuse to believe that it is as simple or as linear as that. I am, perhaps, of the John Healy School of Thought. John Healy or ‘Backbencher’ as he called his column in the Irish Times, years ago, used to maintain, almost on a weekly basis, that a country is bigger than an economy. If drinking is related only and solely to the changing economic climates, then I would have to ask the question why any government should spend money on health education regarding alcohol. But more importantly it creates a strange and maybe even dangerous equation that asserts that we will bring our drinking under control again only when we become economically poor again.

Anyway, there is little fun in economics. Of all the sciences, it is perhaps the most boring. I have enough Irish blood in me to want to find someone to blame. There is no fun if you can’t personalise and name the culprits. So I blame Jack Charlton and Michael Flatly.

In 1991 I asked James Mackey to give a lecture here in Derry. He entitled it ‘Derry in Britain in Europe, The Last Men on Earth, The Last of the Free’. In addressing Irish culture he wrote the following: ‘At the other end of the cultural kaleidoscope furthest from the artist, is thought to reside the football fan. And yet the Irish experience on the continent during the recent World Cup (the Jack Charlton World Cup) can surely reverse our judgement. Our fans put us on the map. Not just geographically, though that is important too. I can still remember how surprised and disappointed I was when I first travelled extensively in Europe in the early 50's to find that few, even in travel agencies, knew where I had come from. No matter how I rolled the ‘r’ in Ireland or Ireland, they still seemed to think that I was talking about Holland or Iceland or an island on a European lake somewhere. Our football fans changed that but they did more - more even than promise an increase in our tourist revenue. They actually make people want to come and see the culture they embodied, rooted as culture always is, even in the very physical features of their native place. For they did embody their culture in this way, just as much as the monks and scholars who preceded them embodied it in their way. They came to celebrate victory and to prove noble in defeat, to enjoy the hospitality offered to them to reward it, not merely with money but with their own colourful presence and their particular idiom, and so to leave these peoples and places enriched, and certainly no worse off for their having passed that way. Culture is incarnate in all manner of comportment and in all various groupings that make a particular people. Any form of practice which embodies a value worth having or pursuing is a part of culture and will enrich any who encounter it, provided only that it is not used to dominate or control’. That was written in 1991, not all that long after the Irish team had done so well in the World Cup and the Irish Fans acclaimed the best in the world.

We found ourselves around that time. Or at least thought we did. Our confidence and our self-esteem shot up the Richter Scale. We came out of the shadows and our passport and our identity became badges of honour and distinction. We could party like no other. We had the ‘craic’ like no other had. We knew how to enjoy ourselves like no other. We knew how to rejoice in victory and defeat like no other. The passions were released and displayed, and were good humoured and inoffensive. And at the centre of it all was the drink. Growing quantities of drink, resulting, in the short term, seemingly only in hangovers. To give it even more power and rhythm Michael Flatly came dancing into the middle of it, releasing a passion that had been perhaps pent up for generations.

Continuing the same theme I wrote a short article a few years ago about George Best and his infamous Antibuse transplant. I wrote that ‘We Irish are in love with the image of ourselves as fun loving, carefree, warm and gregarious people. We are in love with the intimacy and the hilarity that drinking provides. We are also in love with the idea of being loved and admired by other peoples and nations. We have travelled widely and have come to the conclusion that our personality and our approach to living, are preferable to what we see in others. And much of what we judge to be better is most vividly demonstrated and incarnated in our drinking.

Just as George Best had a genius for football and we believe we have a genius for living. And perhaps we do. But just as the genius that George Best was gifted with drove him or lured him into an affair with drink, so the genius that has been gifted to the Irish is steering us down the same path. George, like most drinkers, had little understanding that he was getting himself embroiled in a relationship with the most wonderful and the most seductive drug that man has ever discovered. Alcohol has the consistent power to make us feel better, even when we already feel good, and to feel good even when we feel bad. It does it with consummate ease and consistency, and initially the only kickback is an acceptable and temporary hangover. Of all drugs, it is the one that spreads its magic most alluringly, and its poison least dramatically. And those who are unaware of its magic and its poison are like flies being drawn to a spider’s web.

That is what Ireland has come to learn during the last number of years. Until recently, had you asked parents their biggest concern for their children, I am sure illicit drugs would have been the answer. Two weeks ago the Policing Board published a postal survey that revealed that after burglary, the single biggest issue that frightened people was underage drinking and among catholic respondents it was the biggest. Stark and informative as that may be, let it not fool us that drinking is only a teenage and young person’s problem.

But it would be unwise to believe that culture begins and ends with the ‘craic’, the music, the song and the particular idiom. Culture always reaches and is inculcated with the religious and spiritual dimension. Culture that is not informed and underpinned by meaning and faith and hope, or, in AA terms, by a higher power, is a culture that has very hollow legs. If it is blessed and dignified by nothing other than the spirit of alcohol then the party is unlikely to be sustained. It will break down into loneliness. That is now happening to Ireland to some great degree. Ireland at drink was captured by a recent Prime Time programme on RTE when they put cameras in six cities and towns scattered across the country. The images were stark and saddening. So many of our youth in a stupor or seeking stupor! Even those of us who knew it was happening were silenced by the crudeness and crudity of the drunkenness. It wasn’t all or nearly all our young people, of course. But then again the cameras were only on the streets and not in houses and the flats where equal amounts of communal or lonely drunkenness abounds. We have a problem and as anyone recovering form an addiction problem knows only too well, the first step in recovery is to admit the problem. Not to exaggerate or embellish the problem but to acknowledge it with as much truthfulness and integrity as possible.

If it is true, as I believe it to be, that an individual man or woman is unlikely to make a healthly and contented recovery from addiction without a deep rooted spiritual insight that underpins and sustains that recovery, then I believe that it is equally true for a nation and a people. It is certainly ironic and perhaps even cruel, that at a time when our drinking was becoming enormously problematic, so the religious structures and rituals that had been so central to Irish life were entering a crisis. The very institutions who claimed to be the light in a dark world, who claimed to be the guardians of ‘the way, the truth and the light’ were being exposed as deeply corrupt and sinful. At a time when they were greatly needed by so many, they were instead embroiled and distracted by their own history and problems. Not that religious institutions are, in themselves, the font of faith and spirituality. That comes from a deeper well than any human institution can provide. And we need to be honest enough to admit that we, the Irish, were too willing and too naïve in giving undue status and authority to Church and Churches who were willing to accept it. And we need to be mature enough to admit that we were late-comers to this crisis of faith and meaning. It had seared through Europe after the Second World War. In 1946 Pascal, a French scientist had written: ‘On beholding the blindness and misery of man, on seeing all the universe dumb, and man without light, left to himself, as it were, astray in this corner of the universe, knowing not who had set him here, what he is here for, or what will become of him when he dies, incapable of all knowledge, I begin to be afraid, as a man who has been carried while asleep to a fearful desert island, and who will awake not knowing where he is and without any means of quitting the island’.

Alcohol is a depressant drug. With persistent and heavy use it has the potential to bring us to Pascal’s island. Those of you who work and help in Northlands and those of you who have gone there for help, know only too well the numbers of addicted people who have or still do inhabit that island. You might even agree with me that, as well as the political will and the enabling legislation, Ireland needs a spiritual revolution. It cannot be the childish spirituality of the past. It will have to admit that faith, if and when it is gifted, is not a state of certainty and security but one that is fragile and riddled with doubt. It must not be a spirituality that is narrow and sectarian in its vision. It might be best captured by Henri Nouwen, one of the finest Catholic spiritual writers of modern times. In 1985 he resigned his professorship at Harvard University, saying that it had brought him to the brink of spiritual crisis, that indeed he was ‘in danger of losing his soul’. He wrote ‘During all these years, I learned that Protestants belong as much to the church as Catholics, and that Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims believe in God as much as Christians do; that pagans can love one another as much as believers can; that the human psyche is multi dimensional, that theology, psychology, and sociology intersect in many places; that women have a call to read the ministry; that homosexual people have a unique vocation in the Christian community; that the poor belong to the heart of the church; and that the spirit of God blows where it wants. All of these discoveries gradually broke down many fences that had given me a safe garden and made me deeply aware that God’s covenant with God’s people included everyone. For me personally, it was a time of searching, questioning, and agonising, a time that was extremely lonely and not without moments of great inner uncertainty and ambiguity. The Jesus I had come to know in my youth had died. I was travelling in a downward way to Emmaus (the journey on which Jesus joined two of his disciples after his death and he didn’t recognise them) and started hearing voices of someone who had joined me on the journey’

Northlands, at its best, has espoused that breadth and depth of spirituality from its earliest days. It has been confirmed and sustained in that spirituality by thousands of people who have trusted it with their histories, their fears, their hurts and their hopes. Its ongoing task is to be a small but significant beacon as Ireland tries to find a more healthy and wholesome relationship with drink.

DENIS BRADLEY