Anyone who logged on to the discussion board on www.castlebar.ie this week will have seen a lengthy discussion on events in Castlebar last Friday night surrounding a Junior Cert disco, when hundreds of teenagers from across the region converged on Castlebar. Anyone who was around the town that night couldn’t fail to notice the large numbers that were out and about, some of them were very drunk, but plenty more were as sober as the day they were born.
Teenage drinking is as big an issue today as it was yesterday, and will be in the future, that is, unless Irish society has a dramatic change in its outlook on life. From as soon as a person is born to the day they are put in the ground hopefully many, many years later, drink plays its ritual part in celebration and grief, it has become the norm.
From an early age, children are immersed in this culture, from the local GAA or soccer team winning a competition and heading to the pub to celebrate, to the alcohol brand logos splashed across their favourite soccer team’s jersey, to watching events unfold in the local bar in their favourite TV show. Combined with the peer pressure from their friends to drink and try and be more grown up in a society that sees childhood shrinking every year as they become more and more exposed to the wider world and its pitfalls and perils at younger and younger age, issues will arise such as teenage drinking which will cause some quarters to throw up their arms in disgust at the next generation.
Then there are others who will say, “sure I was drinking since I was 14 it did me no harm,” and maybe it didn’t do you any harm. But everyone is not the same homogenised unit and if it was fine for you that doesn’t mean it will be fine for someone else. The different nurture and nature of children as they grow up can affect the way they see something like drink, change their outlook on it from something to enjoy and relax with, to something to take as much of as possible and get out of their heads and forget the night.
How many random acts of violence and assault are caused by too much drink? The vast majority. Walk into any district or circuit court sitting any week and stay for the day and take note of how many cases are alcohol related, from public order incidents to violent assaults to the seemingly never dwindling number of drink driving cases that pass across a judge’s desk at every sitting. And the vast majority of those charged with drink driving are not the young male bracket that is normally tagged with being a danger on the road.
The Government has taken on the challenge of raising awareness in relation to alcohol abuse with projects like the www.drinkaware.ie website and television ads, but they can only do so much. The real educating must be done at home which the vast majority of parents do very well, but when teenagers starts to get some freedom they are at the mercy of influence from friends and acquaintances and very few of them want to lose face in front of their peers by not joining into what the perceived cool thing is to do.
Teenagers will get led to do things, and want to try things; it’s the nature and the rebelliousness of youth, but they are also only doing what they believe is the grown up thing to do, because they see it every day.
