Professor Joe Barry:

The issue with the responsible retailing of alcohol, given that is not on a statutory basis, is compliance. Mr. Ross Mac Mathúna mentioned there was 83% compliance, but for mixed trading stores it is 74% compliance. That is 26% non-compliance, which is massive, and nothing has happened about it. These are the stores that have signed up. Regulation does away with all that. We have to take this much more seriously. I was involved in the alcohol monitoring body in the previous decade. We asked that the public health institutes be allowed on that monitoring body and we were explicitly excluded. That was before Mr. Mac Mathúna's time, but we were excluded, so it is not an independent body. One cannot have self-regulation, it does not work in any walk of life and intuitively one can see why. The legal obligation of the manufacturers is to maximise shareholder value. That is fine. The role of the State is to decide when to regulate. We have such a problem in this country. According to the Health Research Board, 10% of people who drink are alcohol dependent. That is huge.

No one likes getting abusive texts or messages as received by Deputy Mitchell O'Connor, but the silent majority want the State and the Government to do something about this. Any time politicians legislate on public health issues, they get huge praise because that is what we elect them to do - to take the balance of all the evidence. In this issue the evidence is overwhelming that we need to be much more proactive.