Ms Paula Leonard:

On that, in terms of planning for health services, at the moment we have no idea how much is even drunk per county in Ireland, never mind if we wanted to drill down to the statistics for a large town or whatever. We can only tell how much alcohol is sold at a national level every year. The licensed trade already has that data. It would not be a significant change to the legislation to include that. As Dr. Gilheany has outlined, it would be possible to say if there are problems with particular venues. It would be possible to then make a case at renewals to say there was an issue, the venue had breached X, Y and Z and these are the associated problems. I also think for planning for health services and prevention activity around reducing harms from alcohol and other drugs, we need to know what is happening in communities and at the moment we do not. We have no idea of volume sales of alcohol even at a county level in this country.