Ivana Bacik (Independent)

I welcome the Minister of State to the House and I also welcome the opportunity to speak on the important issue of health promotion priorities. I listened with great interest to what previous speakers stated. Clearly, this topic covers an enormous spectrum of health issues. Senator Mary White correctly spoke about the need to incorporate physical and mental health. Enormous work must be done on seeking to prevent suicide and decrease suicide rates. She was also correct to focus on bullying which is a major issue. A bullying research centre in Trinity College has done a great deal of work on how to prevent bullying and deal with it when it occurs, whether in schools or in the workplace.

I want to focus on two issues, one of which the Minister of State focused on in her speech and another which has not been raised. Alcohol is an important topic in the examination of health promotion. It feeds into bullying and difficulties with mental and physical health. The Minister of State cited figures which are of great concern. An increase of 147% occurred in alcohol related liver disease between 1995 and 2004. The number of people in hospital with alcohol related problems or injuries increased by 90% in the same period, which is an enormous increase.

I agree with the Minister of State that the issue of abuse of alcohol is of serious concern. However, I do not agree that the Intoxicating Liquor Act does enough to deal with it or to address the problems we have in our culture with alcohol abuse. We debated it at length in this House and at the time I raised some of the difficulties I had with the provisions of the legislation. Some measures concerning education in the Act are positive. Public health education is a vital part of any campaign to address the problems associated with alcohol abuse.

The part of the Act with more teeth contains provisions on the sale of alcohol, particularly relating to closing times. These represent a missed attempt to change our culture around alcohol. The highly restrictive licensing system we have in place at present does not work to prevent excessive consumption of alcohol. According to the figures given by the Minister of State, in Ireland our consumption of alcohol is well above the EU average. However, we have a long tradition of controlling the number of licences granted and the hours at which alcohol may be consumed in licensed premises and bought in off-licences.

This is in contrast with other European countries, particularly on the Continent where more relaxed and liberal licensing laws are in place with regard to the sale of alcohol, where people are more responsible about their personal drinking. We seem to have a culture in which the State has restricted the hours of drinking to a much greater extent and yet people are less responsible in terms of their consumption. This is a conundrum and all of us can grapple with how best to tackle it.

It would have been worth trying an approach which liberalised who could open licensed premises. I would love to have seen nightclub licences to address the issue that people like to dance as well as drink. It would have given people a place to go and would have dealt with public order issues that occur when pubs close. I would like to have seen a programme which introduced licences where food and drink would be sold together and which would have attempted to create a culture more like the European drinking culture where people consume food and drink together and are less likely to abuse alcohol or drink excessively. The problem is that for so long we have been treated like children in terms of drinking laws that people behave like children. It is time to move away from the paternalistic approach. This is one aspect of the issue of excessive alcohol consumption which covers a range of issues.

Another aspect I want to mention is alcohol and sports sponsorship, to which the Minister of State referred. As part of any campaign to address excessive drinking, it is important to examine the advertising and marketing of alcohol and the Minister of State and the legislation have done so. I am glad to see controls on the volume of alcohol advertising. I am also glad to see the Government has agreed to establish a working group to examine this issue.

Last March, I raised this matter in this House and held up a football jersey for a well-known English Premier League football club. It was sold in a shop in Dublin in a size to fit nine and ten year olds. However, it carries prominently the logo of a well-known beer company. The matter was brought to my attention by somebody who was greatly concerned about it. He wanted to buy a football kit for his young son but found they all advertised alcohol.

In January, the UK adopted a code which prohibits the sale to children of jerseys which bear alcohol logos. Alcohol companies which are permitted to sponsor football clubs are not allowed to display their logos on children's kits. When I raised this matter in the Seanad, I also wrote to the Minister for Health and Children, Deputy Mary Harney, requesting that a similar code be introduced here. I stated that if the industry is not willing to do so legislation should be introduced. The Minister responded that no legislative remedies were available to restrict or stop the sale or import of these jerseys. Irish clubs do not do this. It is a matter particular to English Premier League clubs. I would like an update on this issue. Will it be tackled by the working group mentioned by the Minister of State or is it being addressed?

Another aspect of health promotion which has not been touched on in this debate but was raised by Senator Prendergast on the Order of Business — I know she will address it with much more expertise than I — is the issue of health promotion in maternity and reproductive health services. Health promotion strategies and public education can play a major role in promoting public health generally.

The law on reproductive health has had a long and tortuous history. The current law on reproductive health is not best focused at meeting the needs of women and men. Due to constitutional restraints, the needs of the many thousands of women who travel to Britain and abroad for abortions every year are not being met. There are also difficulties in health promotion for crisis pregnancies. I commend the Crisis Pregnancy Agency in its positive work in promoting reproductive health and preventing crisis pregnancies. On Monday, it launched the Think Contraception campaign which will have immense public benefit in educating people about avoiding crisis pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections and diseases. It is most unfortunate that last week's budget announced the agency would be subsumed into the Health Service Executive.