I have always believed that the saying – it is one of my favourite quotations and I do not mind if I receive a Falstaffian response in respect of it –"Ireland sober is Ireland free" has a great ring to it. I was horrified at the suggestion of my dear friend and former colleague Anthony Cronin that the city fathers should remove the statue of Father Mathew from O'Connell Street. This would be a posthumous poetic triumph for the literary generation of Patrick Kavanagh, Flann O'Brien and Brendan Behan, but it would be a terrible symbolic surrender to the drinking culture. I refer here to that culture in the sociological, rather than the artistic, sense.