Mary Moran (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the House and wish him every success in his new role. Many of my colleagues have made reference to the national substance misuse strategy report and I will not go through all of that again. However, one cannot read it without being shocked and horrified at some of the statistics it contains. In particular, I wish to refer to the statistics relating to young people, whereby more than half of 16 year olds have been drunk and one in five drink weekly. As a mother of a 16 year old and as a former teacher, having had four children go through leaving certificate and also having gone to collect them after junior certificate teenage discos, I have been absolutely horrified to see students, who I would know as being fantastic and well behaved in class, out of it from the effects of drink at 16 years of age. It is horrific and would be horrific to their parents if they knew it was going on.

I have been a teetotaller all my life. Very often, having spoken afterwards to students in class, they would ask me "Oh, but do you not drink?", as if there was something radically wrong with a person if they do not drink. Even at 18, they can be remorseful for drinking and for having started to drink at 16.

This is an area where we need to be more forceful. We have alcohol strategies in schools and alcohol projects and so on. Perhaps we could go one step further and highlight the ill health that is associated with alcohol. Another suggestion I would throw out is to perhaps raise the legal age for drinking from 18 to 21, when people are more adult and can make better decisions for themselves. Perhaps that would do something and I would certainly be in favour of it.

We need to be more forceful in highlighting just how much a young person's life can be adversely affected by alcohol. What the World Health Organization considers to be risky or binge drinking is taking 75 g of alcohol on a single drinking occasion, at least once a month, which is four pints of beer, seven pub measures of spirits or a bottle of wine. I know there are many young people who would be shocked to hear they are being classed as binge drinkers every time they go out, or even stay in.

The teenage years are considered to be a time when lifestyle patterns are established. Starting to drink at an early age increases the person's chance of developing problems with alcohol use in later life. This is again where I would like to call into question Senator Barrett's statistics. According to the European school project on alcohol and drugs, Irish children report being drunk more often than those in most other European countries - some 26% in the last month in Ireland in comparison to a European average of 18%.

The question of targeting the marketing of alcohol is another huge area.