Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour)

I confess to being a sceptic on this Bill. It is designed as an interim high-profile response to the public disorder resulting from binge drinking on our streets and public places. It is true that public disorder and anti-social behaviour are worse now than ever before and it is probably true that alcohol abuse is a major contributing factor to this phenomenon. Is more legislation the answer and is this legislation in particular warranted? A more considered sale of alcohol Bill is promised and it may have been wiser to await its production.

Easy access to alcohol, the proliferation of off-licences and below-cost selling probably contribute to drunkenness among teenagers and young people, but the reality may be that people, young or old, will get alcohol if they want it. Is there any evidence that the prohibitive cost of alcohol, for example, in certain fashionable establishments has led to diminished consumption? Given our apparent inability to enforce current laws, will we be able to enforce new laws? There are new powers in this Bill to move drunken youths on from a public place. Is this markedly different from the existing powers to deal with disorderly loitering?

It makes good sense to tackle the proliferation of establishments that can sell drink for off-premises consumption. I am at a loss to understand how closing early morning houses will contain drunkenness and disorder among young people who generally do not frequent those establishments, a point to which I will revert in the context of the Minister's comments. However, the pattern of recent years, particularly in the past decade, seems to have established that every Tom, Dick and Harry has been authorised to sell alcohol from every forecourt and premises with a roof. There is a suspicion that some unsavoury characters took advantage of the simple procedure to get a licence over the past decade. The renewal of authorisation seems to have been automatic unless grave breaches of the law were established, but we know that some of those establishments have been selling to under aged persons and residents associations and others know that public disorder in adjacent public spaces can often be related directly to a particular off-licence. I do not know what the practical impact of requiring the District Courts to give such permissions will be, but at least it permits some evidence to be heard as to the track record, conduct and character of the applicant.

The personal and social consequences of excessive alcohol consumption are horrific. If anyone doubts the accuracy of this description, he or she should read the recently published report, Alcohol Related Harm in Ireland. My scepticism derives not from any denial of the harm done by the abuse of alcohol, but from an absence of conviction that this societal malaise can be addressed by the enactment of more legislation. Of course there should be more rigorous regulation of the sale of alcohol and more rigorous enforcement of those regulations, but there is no logical reason for not forbidding persons under 21 years of age from purchasing alcohol from off-licences.

There ought to be traceability capable of being enforced so that the small number of regular offenders who supply alcohol to under aged persons can be shut down. If it is true that there is lack of clarity about Garda powers to confiscate drink from youths in certain circumstances, then it is right, within limits, that the Garda should have such powers.

The sickness in our society where young people drink to get drunk is more difficult to address. Why do persons at such a young age feel the need to join the binge drinking merry-go-round? Is the drink culture so all-pervasive that young people regard it as a necessary rite of passage? What blame attaches to adults if this is the case? We have an innovative and creative section of the advertising industry devoted to coming up with ever more imaginative ways to attract young people to a more glamorous lifestyle necessarily involving one brand of alcohol or another. What about parental responsibility? Are parents too preoccupied in the pub or too busy boasting about property prices in the golf club that they have no knowledge of the binge drinking habits of their offspring? As the excellent new television ad says, "when they are drinking they don't notice that I am drinking". Are older siblings purchasing alcohol for the younger members of their family without the knowledge of their parents? If the law disapproves but parents approve, who wins out? Cheating the law, presenting phoney ID, representing oneself as one's older sibling are all deemed great fun. The cumulative effect of all this is to confer approval on conduct that is considered normal behaviour in our society when the opposite should be the case. The notion that this can be policed is very doubtful if parents and sellers of alcohol conspire to make it appear normal.

Whereas I hold no brief for publicans or off-licences, we should not underestimate the impact of some of the impositions in the Bill. If one manages a convenience store, there is nothing convenient about being required to queue for a second time to purchase a bottle of wine. Nor is it insignificant for the small trader to be required to reconfigure his mixed trading premises so that alcohol sales are not only separated from other sales but that a barrier is erected thus requiring dedicated staff.

The relationship between "early houses" and rampaging youths entirely escapes me. I have a high regard for the accessible and practical insights in the report expertly prepared by Dr. Gordon Holmes and his committee, but I can discover no argument that justifies this latter recommendation.

I expect we will have greater participation in this debate by Government backbenchers than we had on the debate on Thornton Hall, the business immediately preceding this debate. It is the first occasion during my time in this House, that all Stages of a Bill were taken and not a single Government Deputy offered. When I saw the Minister of State, Deputy Sargent, in the House until a few minutes ago, I assumed he would contribute, having somehow missed out on contributing to the debate on Thornton Hall, on which he made such committed pledges a little more than a year ago.

It appears we will have wider participation in this debate — perhaps that was the purpose of the Minister's interventions in that in introducing the Bill he went out of his way to tell us that he had detailed discussions with the trade bodies representing supermarkets and convenience stores and he also had detailed discussion with the "early morning houses". I commend the Minister's proactive approach. That is the way to work in our democratic system but I wish he had applied it to the Immigration, Residence and Protection Bill. I wish he had met some of the organisations that made representations to the committee or met some of the stakeholders regarding Thornton Hall. Many advocates of reform would love to have had his ear, but for some reason he is personally available to meet the publicans regarding this Bill. It is good he corrected in the Bill some of the more crazy provisions in legislation by indicating that the separation requirement will no longer apply in the sense of the need for erecting a barrier and, consequently, the system of double queuing, separate tills and a separate set of staff. As I understand it, that is no longer a requirement. No doubt the Minister will correct me if I am wrong and no doubt he will a go at that anyway.

As regards the "early morning houses", it is proposed to abolish the proposal in regard to them. There will no more of that nonsense. The proposition that young people who are engaged in public disorder are engaged in it at 7 a.m. and how a proposal to address that can end up in a Bill is beyond me. I do not know how we do daft things such as that.

To be honest, I am out of kilter, I suspect, with my party and with Deputy Charles Flanagan. I find it difficult to be grave about this Bill. It is a PR stunt. Now that the Minister has gutted it, as he wisely has, very little is left in it. If the Minister is bringing forward a sale of alcohol Bill, why is there a mad rush to introduce this Bill? When I got my schedule of business I was fascinated to find that at the bottom of the list it is stated that Report Stage of the alcohol Bill will be taken will be taken next week; this was before Second Stage of the Bill was taken, not to mention Committee Stage. Deputy Charles Flanagan asked where is the protocol in this respect, which provides that at least two weeks shall elapse between the ending of Committee Stage and the taking of Report and Final Stages of a Bill. Deputy Charles Flanagan and I met the senior people in the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform, which is always a great pleasure. They had not heard of this Bill; they had a huge legislative schedule but an alcohol Bill was not included in it. I do not know where this Bill came from and why it is so urgent as if the youth of Ireland will drink themselves to death unless it is enacted next week. Some of the youth of Ireland, unfortunately and regrettably, are drinking themselves to death, but I greatly doubt if there is much in this Bill that will stop that.

I accept that an accessible, sensible report has been prepared by Dr. Gordon Holmes and his people. I also accept that it is proper that there ought to be rigorous enforcement of the regulation of the sale of alcohol and that easy access to alcohol has to have something to do with the situation in which we find ourselves, but, I submit again, that the malaise in our society is deeper than can be addressed by measures such as this one.

I do not know what swung the Minister to abolish the proposal regarding the "early houses", the important point is that he changed his mind about it. It is important when one is wrong that one changes one's mind. I received very learned submissions on this subject, one of them drawing my attention to Kevin O'Higgins's Bill in 1927, which all but enforced the provisions of the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association on all of us, but the remarkable thing is that he left the early morning houses as they were. He did not touch them in terms of the 1927 Bill. The Ceann Comhairle will be interested to hear that along with Matt Talbot, the following were brought to my attention, namely, that over the decades many of Ireland's literary greats such as Brendan Behan, Myles na gCopaleen, Patrick Kavanagh, James Donleavy and Oliver St. John Gogarty were regular early morning imbibers and incorporated that into the richness and cultural fabric of their writings. I would say it was the literary angle that swung the Minister rather than any suggestion that the publicans would have his ear. It would say it was the literary influence. The Minister is a well known abstainer and abstentionist.

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