Dermot Ahern (Louth, Fianna Fail)

In some of my public comments I referred to another recent survey carried out in England by the Local Government Association. It reported increases in alcohol-related incidences. For example, half of all police authorities stated that the longer opening hours had simply resulted in incidences occurring later in the night. The survey of 20 police forces indicated that crimes committed between 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. had increased by 22%. Meanwhile three quarters of the health authorities surveyed have reported increases in spending as a result of the rise in accident and emergency admissions. The chairman of the Local Government Association is reported as saying that the longer drinking hours have made no impact whatsoever in reducing alcohol-related violence. He said that the vast majority of councils, police and hospitals have reported no change at all with violent incidences generally just being shifted to later in the evening.

Based on our levels of alcohol consumption coupled with our unfortunate culture for binge drinking — I gave some of the figures earlier — there is no reason to believe that longer opening hours here would lead to any improvement in the levels of anti-social behaviour and public disorder. On the contrary, there is a likelihood that the situation would worsen. I have had detailed discussions with the Garda Commissioner and other senior gardaí on the matter. Their view is that later opening hours for some premises would simply result in people moving from premises to premises as they close. The reality is that as the pub closes people will go to the late bar and then on to the nightclub. The Garda Síochána strongly preferred the situation that pertained until recently where there were only 36 theatre licences in Dublin. Up until two years ago the closing time for nightclubs and late bars was 2.30 a.m. apart from on Mondays.

People refer to staggered opening. In reality people would be staggering from premises to premises if we gave an opportunity to go from bar to late bar and then on to nightclubs. Local authorities have some responsibility in this regard. They were given the power by the Oireachtas in 2003 to give a recommendation to local District Court judges about closing times. However, no local authority has used this power. While I understand the difficulty people in the industry have and understand the arguments made, the Bill was in effect designed to reduce the accessibility to and availability of drink in a very targeted way in certain areas.

The Bill will not be the silver bullet to solve all the problems. We need to deal with education and instil in the population that what is going on cannot go on forever. From generation to generation we are now beginning to have one of the worst drinking cultures in the western world. Following the loosening of the legislation in recent years the situation has got worse and not better. In this Bill we are merely curtailing the opportunity that certain establishments had to put in theatre licences, which was a loophole to get around the special exemption. We are not changing in any way the existing time limits for special exemptions, which for some years have been 2.30 a.m. with drinking up time to 3 o'clock on most nights and 1 a.m. on Monday mornings.

We had a debate a number of years ago on the Sunday night-Monday morning issue. The empirical evidence shows that there is a serious problem with abstention from work on Monday mornings. Before we changed the Monday morning closing time, there was a significant difficulty in getting people to work on a Monday morning. Unfortunately I cannot accept the amendment. I can understand that the Deputies on the far side of the House are genuinely interested in the issue of public disorder in their communities. However, given the evidence on our doorstep and in other countries around the world, their suggestion to allow nightclubs to open, in effect, until 4 a.m. is the wrong way to go.

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