John Dolan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

The Minister is intent on meeting stakeholders to discuss separation. Particular reference has been made to retailers or to the owners of what Senator Butler refers to as "community shops", which is a decent and accurate way to describe them. First among the stakeholders we have to consider are the children and young people of Ireland. In saying that, I am not dissing people in retail.I grew up in Tipperary Town. I could take the Minister from one end of the town to the other and name the families that ran grocery shops, little pubs, etc. As in every other town they have been decimated by the big multiples. Senators Kieran O'Donnell and Kelleher referred to their valiant efforts to reinvent themselves in order to support themselves. I do not see them as the villain of the piece.

Contrary to what other contributors have said, I am clear that separation is significant. Two weeks ago I was working in Montenegro for a number of days. The first night when I went to a restaurant with a colleague I got annoyed that people were smoking at the tables around us. Twenty years ago I would not have got annoyed. In his opening remarks, the Minister very graciously mentioned Deputy Micheál Martin and the smoking ban. Forgetting about party and all the rest of it, that stands as a great testimony to our country. There has been a huge change across Europe, in any countries in which we travel. That is the one that was awkward for me because it is: "Oh no. The culture. They don't do this."

Here is how I relate that to separation. It is down to the child and the young person going in to the premises. It will be a slow burn; it will not happen overnight. We need to have confidence in ourselves about this. It will become normal not to see alcohol set out beside nappies and other bits and pieces. That will have an effect in the same way that we now consider it odd - to put it mildly - that people would smoke in a place where we eat or drink. Cultural change happens and it has a real effect. It is not appropriate to think that something like alcohol can be treated as if it is an ordinary substance.

When the crash came in Ireland, many people changed their minds very quickly about the nanny state. Let me explain that. People were happy to get 100% mortgages and more as if they almost had a right to it. How dare the banks, regulators or whoever intervene. Sadly for some of those people, their day of ruin came. They lost their houses. They then turned around and said, "Where was my nanny state? Where was my protector? Where was the regulator? Where was the governance in banks?" If we are to err, we must err on the side of the duty of care and rebalance it as we go along.

Am I right to say that alcohol is a poison? It is a poisonous substance, as I understand it. Dr. James Reilly, Dr. Tony Holohan, Dr. Keith Swanick or others having sat down with a patient will then give a prescription and they will have to go to a special shop and get it dispensed. That is treating things that have an inherent goodness in them and I do not disagree with the idea that drinking alcohol can have pleasant and good effects. I am not a zealot when it comes to the issue of alcohol. While they can speak for themselves on this, I do not think any of my colleagues are zealots on this issue. However, we need to treat certain substances with the respect they deserve. If we were talking in a different domain and were talking about war, we would talk about our troops as being courageous and about the enemy being cowardly even though both of them would have practised the same behaviours.

It is not helpful to use terms such as "ideologues" and "zealots" at this point. I see people who have passion, have a public interest and have a bucketful of evidence behind what is being said here. We are going to have to cut the cloth to measure and make some judgments about it.

This issue is not primarily about us as adults. I am in my 60s. Others are in their 60s or close to it. Others are thankfully much younger. This is about children and young people. That is where we have to come down on this. Senator McDowell spoke strongly about his belief that separation was unnecessary. There is a lot of evidence-----