Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I support the Bill. It represents a small change but one which will not do any harm. I confess my great ignorance on this matter because I am not big into pubs. In 1978, when I was 27, I organised a meeting in a hotel in Claremorris at which we always had our meetings. The intention was to set up a timber milling project but it was Good Friday and the pubs were closed. We held the meeting in my car and we set up the timber mill, which was an acorn that grew into an oak because there has been milling in the area ever since - albeit under a different company - and now it has the single biggest output in Ireland. The law on pub hours would not have been huge in my consciousness until that day.

Good Friday is actually a big travelling day in the part of the country in which I live. It can be very annoying, when travelling throughout the country, to find that most places are closed, although this was more the case in the past because all of the journey from Galway and Dublin now takes place on the motorway. A lot of people go to Mám Éan where the patrician pilgrimage takes place but I do not see how that would be discommoded by the local pubs and restaurants being open. I echo what Deputy Maureen O'Sullivan said and I am disappointed that this Bill has come in ahead of legislation that has been in existence a lot longer, namely, that which tries to do something about sales in off-licences. I wish we had shown the same alacrity in dealing with that issue. Let us be honest about it. We talk and talk about the health system but if we could cut down on the abuse of alcohol and everything that arises from it, and move away from our complacency, some emergency departments and medical sections of hospitals would be less full. There are horrendous statistics on this. In the case of some 40% of middle aged men who wind up in hospital, their illness can be traced to an overindulgence in alcohol. At weekends, our emergency departments are chock-a-block and it often causes severe difficulty for hospital workers when fights break out.

Some time ago, I mislaid the keys to my car, having left them in a taxi in Galway by mistake, and I went to the Garda station at 1 a.m. There was an event in Galway on that night. I have been on the Garvaghy Road when a march was taking place and I have also been on the Ormeau Road, but I felt a lot more comfortable there than walking down the streets of Galway that night. I went into the Garda station and it a chaotic, with all the activity all seemingly driven by alcohol. I agree that we should change the law but that will not affect the abuse of alcohol. We should not take our eye off our real focus, which should be on the fact that there is a massive problem with alcohol in this country.

There was a reference to the holy hour. There is often a law of unintended consequences and a pub owner whom I know well still bemoans the ending of the holy hour because her pub was right beside the church. When the holy hour was in place, families allowed whoever wanted to have a drink after mass to go into the pub for an hour, knowing they would be home for dinner at a reasonable hour - I think they closed at 2 p.m. After the holy hour was got rid of, she got no customers on Sunday mornings. One should always beware of what one asks for. One of the things that hastened the death knell of the rural pub was the extension of the opening hours, and I was part of the Government who took the decision. This was particularly the case on a Sunday night because it dissipated the crowd and where there was no crowd there was no fun. People stopped turning up and those who were not working came late, while those who were working came early. Since then, there have been far fewer people in the pubs on Sunday nights. There are often unintended consequences, though I cannot see any in respect of this Bill.

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