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ALCOHOL ABUSE IN Ireland has cost the State €3.7 billion up to the year 2007, according a study on the issue by the HSE.
The report states that the government has to foot the bill for the consequences of alcohol abuse across a variety of sectors – from health issues to work-related accidents. The study shows that the Department of Justice, alone, spends 13 per cent of its budget directly on dealing with alcohol-related crime.
It says that alcohol consumption in Ireland has doubled between 1970 and 2003 – one the largest increases in the world during that period. Ireland also has one of the highest levels of underage drinking in the developed world and one of the worst records for binge drinking, according to the study.
The HSE reports says that there is “strong evidence” from many countries that increasing the price of alcohol reduces alcohol consumption and related harms – and it urges the government to “seriously consider” rising taxes on alcohol to combat the social costs that abuse can pose. It points out that, apart from the tangible consequences of alcohol abuse, the human cost of misusing alcohol is “difficult or impossible” to define.
However, a spokesperson for the Alcohol Beverage Federation of Ireland told TheJournal.ie that the figures contained in the reports were “totally out of date”.
“The report is based on statistics up to 2007 and, in many cases, significantly before then,” the spokesperson said. “It is important to note that alcohol consumption in Ireland declined steadily from 2001 – that decline accelerated dramatically from 2007, to the extent that average consumption in Ireland is now back to mid-1990s levels and is approaching European norms”.
The ABFI called for “evidence -based solutions” to address alcohol misuse, saying that it did not believe that excise and taxation increases effectively addressed the problem.
“Increasing prices will simply penalise the average consumer who enjoys alcohol responsibly and will encourage further cross-border purchasing of alcohol to the detriment of local jobs and the national economy,” the spokesman said.
Meanwhile, the Vintner’s Federation of Ireland (VFI) backed calls for a minimum price for alcohol to help prevent the abuse and misuse of alcohol – saying that such a move would go “a long way towards tackling binge drinking and the associated problems this brings”.
The VFI said that the irresponsible sale and promotion of alcohol needed to be tackled, however it warned that a “blanket increase” in excise was not the best way to do so – and the focus should instead be placed on cheap alcohol “which is often sold as a loss leader… made easily available and promoted in a wholly irresponsible way” by large supermarkets.
“Well over half of the alcohol sold in Ireland is now sold outside of the pub, often in the uncontrolled environment of the supermarkets,” said Gerry Mellett, president of the VFI. “ It is no coincidence that the increase in underage drinking, binge drinking and associated social and health problems as outlined in this weeks HSE report has occurred in parallel to the steady increase in off trade sales.”
Padraig Cribben, chief executive of the VFI, added: “Any more tax increases would make us totally unattractive to tourists and make the price of drink substantially higher than all other EU economies… The focus must specifically be on those selling cheap alcohol and agreeing a minimum price rather than a broad sweep of excise increases.”
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Yeah, like the price of drinks in Irish pubs and restaurants is not already totally extortionate! This morning Diageo announced a drop of 3% in sales and is not ruling out job losses, raise the price more and the sales will drop further leading to even more job losses. People must take responsibility for their own alcohol consumption it’s not down to the state to price people out of drinking with taxes that are then spent on anything but services to help alcoholics etc, stop with the nanny state. Raising taxes on alcohol just means the people who spend more of their income on it (ie the poorest) will be hit the hardest, the overpaid and incompetent fools who run the HSE won’t care if the price rise, they can afford it on their overblown salaries and anyway it’s usually the tax payer who picks up their hefty bar and restaurant bills.
Absolutely, I drink because I enjoy it, not because it’s reasonably priced. Morale in the country is low enough as it is, one thing that might help is give us something to smile about for once, like reducing the price of a pint.
@Matthew … you enjoy it? Well we’l have to raise that a bit more so. Your not supposed to enjoy things here. Didn’t the catholic church teach you anything?
Oh yeah, sorry about that, i’ll just go mope in the rain so.
Sure we’ll all go up the north again and purchase and cost them hundreds of millions.
They haven’t a clue.
Damn right Del
I would like to comment on this as an Off- Licence owner.
Since the Government reduced the duties on alcohol two years ago , the smuggling Market from the North has practically ceased.
However the major problem still exists, in as much as that the Publican has in most cases not passed on the reduced wholesale cost to his Patrons.
How is it that we can retail a Longneck in our store at 80c. and it becomes e4 to e5 in an average pub ?
Or as an example , we retail vodka at e13 and it become e4 , a shot in a pub ?
Come on publicans , wake up and smell the coffee ! or else the Government will!
Incidentally , this represents gross profit levels of 500% , on longnecks and 570% on the spirits !
Mixers are also similarly being abused in terms of the public being taken for a ride – and the Publicans complain as to why the pubs are largely empty ?????
Nowhere in the world w
Spot on.
Eddie you’ve hit the nail on the head with regards to overcharging by publicans. Soft drinks and mixers in particular are just ridiculous, wine is another area where they rip people off big time, don’t even mention crisps, nuts etc., also the pint price and glass price anomaly does not make sense, if a glass is half a pint then it should be half the price of the pint, right?. The prices charged in some establishments are just over the top and put people off going into these places. Like you say, no wonder they are half empty yet many publicans just don’t see it. People are voting with their feet, buying their booze in supermarkets and in off licences who offer good deals at fair prices which is something a hell of a lot of publicans don’t seem to grasp, you have to offer the punters more than just a place to sit down have a drink you have to offer them value for money on those purchases they make right now in Ireland spending your money on drinks at pub, hotel and restaurant prices is not good value for money. People simply don’t have the money to take it any more and the publicans, suppliers and breweries need to wake up to that reality. One more area that needs reducing is the obscene level of taxation on alcohol which the Irish govt. has taken to extortionate proportions and one which they seem to think can be abused indefinitely and used as cash cow to fund other expenditure.
A couple of things wrong with your comment pubs make 70-80% gross profit on a longneck and around 45-50% on draught products. Unlike an off licence pubs have massive overheads which have only increased over the past decade such as imro, ppi, insurance and an entire premises to maintain and refurbish on a constant basis along with the staff to serve the drink itself not to mention entertainment. If publicans are making so much money why have so many pubs closed and many are in receivership. If you take every euro a pub takes in and deduct the vat, wages, expenses, overheads , mortgage, I think you will find there is not a left in the pot.
You gotta love the way this report is from 4 Years ago – wake up people we had a booming economy then! I’d love to see how it compares to now as far as I’m concerned more people are drinking from home and more pubs are closing as they ain’t getting the business. If they increase the tax on Alcohol they are driving more people out of work when we need every single job this economy can get.
It seems a very blunt instrument to tackle many different problems and will penalise a lot of people who don’t drik too much and don’t do anything wrong while drunk.
Underage drinking? Create solutions that deal with underage drinking. And maybe look at the social causes like the way that in most countries, people will have their first drink with their family rather than with friends hiding behind a hedgerow or petrol station.
Crime from drinking? Look at where the source of the drink is for people committing crime. I doubt the average country pub is much of a problem, while I could imagine that late bars have a significant impact. So instead of a blunt tax on all drink, adjust the licence conditions to have licence extensions costing more to pay for the problems. Although that is speculative and I’d prefer some proper research before a policy is adopted.
Out of interest, when people go on about underage drinking in Ireland, do they allow for the fact that our legal drinking age is 18, when in most European countries it is 16?
The legal drinking age has been raised to 18 in most European countries at this stage – a small few still have beer and wine consumption at 16 alright. But regardless of the laws of other European countries, we really need to follow the attitudes of the people of these countries when it comes to drinking. In a lot of places, it’s perfectly normal for a 14/15 year old to have a drink with their family at dinner, and like you said Chris, this will be a big part of the solution to underage drinking here. Alcohol is then seen as something normal and not a forbidden fruit that teenagers need to get their hands on – they’ve already been introduced to it so it’s not a big thing for them anymore.
And like you said too, licence conditions have to be looked at also to sort out the crime problem, rather than taxes. People will pay these taxes anyway, so nothing will change. We’ve all been saying it for years that emptying hundreds of people out onto city streets at the same time is a recipe for disaster. Yet, the powers-that-be cannot see this. We all see it when we go on our holidays that when pubs can close at a time of their choosing, crowds will naturally filter away as people get tired/bored/run out of money etc. There’s no rush for taxis and food all at once, so there’s much less fighting as a result.
Such bullshit.
Definitely shopping up north if this happens.
Screw them, robbing us every way they can. They never talk about the amount if jobs in pubs, off licence, brewery and clubs that alcohol sustains.
Another example of the closed mindedness of our government.
The sooner I get my savings together to leave this dump the better.
The government take our Potential savings away in the form of taxes!
i don’t agree with increasing taxes on alcohol to price the average consumer who enjoy alcohol responsibly out of the market. i would like to know why a report from 2007 is only being published now and how much that cost to the tax payer?? and secondly isn’t over 70% of public spending spent on the hse in their annual budget? are we getting value for money one wonders? no disrespect to any of the hard working nurses and junior doctors who are doing a superb job. . .
Don’t drink so don’t care.
dont know why your getting thumbs down?
Angry alcoholics
3 things impact alcohol consumption.
Culture, availability and price.
Increasing prices in supermarkets and off-licenses would be reasonable.
Why would increasing the price in an off licence be reasonable? Why should people who can’t afford pub prices be hit with an increase?
Why are people paying any attention to what the HSE say? An organisation managed by an overpaid underworked shower of idiots
Smuggler.
The government only ever talk about this stuff to shut the nanny-staters up for a while. The ONLY reason government will increase taxes on alcohol is purely for revenue generation.
The views of health professionals are greatly at odds with the views of the general public on this matter. They have to deal impartially with the aftermath of excessive drinking.
If you’ve ever had the misfortune of having a non-alcohol-related injury on a Saturday night, a trip to A&E will give you a clear-sighted view of how serious the country’s alcohol problem is. I recall lots of loud drunk people filling the room and delaying my treatment by many hours. My anecdote tallies with reports from A&E medics such as Chris Luke in Cork.
Psychopharmacologists deem alcohol to be a class A drug – more dangerous than Ecstasy.Health professionals say people are presenting at younger and younger ages with alcohol-related illnesses.I’ve heard it proposed that people should be asked to pay for their own stomach pumps (my heart agrees, my head says that’s a dangerous path to follow.)
Most people see themselves as being moderate drinkers and consider problem drinkers to consist of a minuscule minority who give everyone a bad name. It’s not as small a minority as we think. Our definition of what constitutes a problem is more extreme than the definitions of our southern European neighbours and of health professionals.
It’s hard to have a rational debate when experts on the health effects of booze are deemed to be killjoys or advocates of a nanny state. For my part, I believe in legalizing (and taxing) many illegal drugs because the war on drugs is bound to fail, because drug gangs kill people, and because there’s a huge anomaly with one of the most lethal drugs being legal. In that respect, I can hardly be deemed an advocate of the nanny state. (I’d rather not side-track the discussion on this personal view, just to say that it’s simplistic to label advocates of the tax as being die-hard nanny-staters.)
It’s wrong to view this debate solely in the context of alcohol being a problem for alcoholics and no-one else. Many binge drinkers are not alcoholics – they’re still doing themselves great damage on a Friday or Saturday night. We all have to live in this drink culture, regardless of how much we drink.
The cost of heavy drinking is borne not just by drinkers themselves, but also by society (policing costs, health costs, absenteeism, family breakdown etc.) Even if you’re perfectly civilized after 8 pints (and I know many people who are) it’s very bad for you.
I’m pretty sure the taxes on booze don’t cover the health costs.
As for the plight of publicans, their greed makes it hard for me to be too sympathetic to the owners (though it is a problem for the staff). How many pubs are closing because their owners gambled on property? The cost of soft drinks (which have no sin taxes imposed on them) almost matches the cost of alcoholic drinks.
Undoubtedly, some people (not the whole country) will go up north for cheaper booze, and undoubtedly a rise in tax won’t change a culture overnight. We have had higher taxes on booze than other more moderate drinking cultures that have not had the need for such a strong deterrent. That’s not to say that the high taxes are no deterrent at all; they still constitute a greater deterrent than all the po-faced anti-alcohol campaigns on television. Almost everyone commenting here agrees the pub trade will suffer from a tax increase and that there’ll be lower alcohol consumption as a result.
I reckon any deterrent or brake on what is a problem ought to be considered seriously. I imagine, though it’s too early to tell, that even without the tax increase, the recession will have at least one positive health outcome as people start drinking less. Drink-related health problems increased during the boom, so my educated guess seems logical. Medically speaking, drink is a depressant, so the argument that we need it in the recession to cheer us up seems dubious. Surely there are more imaginative and sustainable ways of cheering ourselves up – sports, theatre, cinema, volunteering, evening classes, music… Many of these alternative activities can create jobs for people, so the argument that less drinking necessarily results in job losses rather than job displacement is not entirely convincing. If our government cares about our health, surely it has a duty to nudge us towards healthier lifestyles, particularly when taxpayers have to pick up the tab for unhealthy lifestyles. More important than the financial tab is the emotional tab – the spouses and families who have to deal with problem drinkers. Any measure that makes these drinkers reconsider their habits is surely a good thing.
I understand that the ‘lightweight’ (note the quotation marks) who has the recommended daily allowance of alcohol or just slightly more will also be hit by an alcohol tax. This can be counted in cents, not euros. How many people really fall into that category and isn’t it a price worth paying?
This is more of a health issue than a moral issue.It’s impossible to overlook the fact that excess can be great fun (for a while). I imagine many who had no sympathy for Cowen after garglegate (and that minor matter of his party screwing the country) still agreed with his statement that he was a believer in ‘Everything in moderation, including moderation.’ I’ve over-indulged in my day too and sometimes it was pretty enjoyable. For that reason, I am reluctant to cast moral judgment. Nonetheless, I think a heavy drinking lifestyle is highly dangerous.
I’m bracing myself for a million thumbs down but I’m in favor of the tax.
Darren – if they are the measly margins that they claim to have – they should be buying from us ????
On the basis of what you are saying – they must be paying e3 for a longneck and selling it for a fiver – truly very BAD buying at wholesale level by the publicans !
Overheads , to my knowledge are not part of a GP calculation !
Look folks, speaking as a supplier, the groceries order is the problem. I.e below cost selling by supermarkets using alcohol as a loss leader. Negative margin products at the rear of the store passed aisles full of high margin products. The publican and independent(your Neighbour maybe) is the victim, not the HSE.
I’ve worked in the bartrade 11 years now and I’ve never seen it this bad , I have nights there is either nobody in the bar or so many you can count them on one had, if they are worried about youths and abusing drink why Not change the age of drinking (ie 21) and lower the price of a pint to fill the pubs and generate more revenue .
If it has cost â
Wtf??? I didn’t write that. I wanted to know what year the study started if it’s up to 2007.
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