Professor Joe Barry:

I thank the Chairman and joint committee for affording us this opportunity. We read with interest the transcript of the committee's interaction on 27 March with the three main sports bodies. I have been playing sport since my early teens and only gave up contact sports after five years of playing over-35s soccer. Like the majority of Irish adults, I, too, drink alcohol. I continue to enjoy watching and attending all sports codes and agree that sports organisations have a very important part to play in the social life of the country. I was, therefore, saddened by what the heads of the IRFU, the FAI and the GAA had to say to the committee on 27 March.

I would like to concentrate in my presentation on the influence of alcohol marketing. Alcohol marketing and advertising does work. It influences young people's alcohol beliefs and behaviour. The alcohol companies would not spend so much on marketing and advertising if it did not work. That is obvious. We have much evidence that young people exposed to alcohol branding begin drinking at an earlier age and that this can lead to dependence in adulthood. The younger a person is when he or she commences drinking alcohol the greater the chance he or she will have a dependency problem from his or her 30s onwards.

A study commissioned by the Department of Health in 2001 showed that alcohol advertisements were the favourite among children. They are expensive to produce, but obviously they are the best advertisements. A study in the United States in 2006 showed that young people who watched more alcohol advertisements on television were more likely to have drunk beer. It also showed that for each dollar spent on alcohol advertisements alcohol consumption increased and that drinking by people brought up in more advertising rich environments plateaued in their late 20s, while drinking by people exposed to alcohol marketing plateaued in their early 20s. As such, what one is exposed to as a teenager has long-term effects. Another study in Australia and New Zealand showed that sports people exposed to alcohol sports sponsorship had higher drinking scores. In this study approximately 600 people in New South Wales were asked about their exposure to sports sponsorship in their sports organisations. There was a link between sports sponsorship and their drinking behaviour.