Michael McDowell (Dublin South East, Progressive Democrats)

I believe most emphatically that the consumption of alcohol with food is part, though, I concede, not the entirety, of the solution. As long as we surrender to vested interests to separate the consumption of Irish produced alcohol, be it spirits or otherwise, from food and withdraw from most people in Ireland the opportunity to combine the two, we must take moral responsibility for the emergence of superpubs and the binge drinking culture. We cannot have it both ways.

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