In a Seanad debate on under-age drinking on 22 March 2001, I said:

It is time we faced up to the fact that passing further legislation is not the way to tackle under age drinking. I cannot say that often enough. Legislation is in place and it seems to be working to the extent that it can do so. Making further inroads into the problem demands an attack on attitudes but we cannot expect legislation to do that.

I then transferred my scepticism to whether the new law would ever be implemented, and whether we would ever see pubs temporarily losing their licences because they were caught serving under age drinkers. It seems, however, that I was wrong about that point as well. The Garda Síochána assure me that the law is working and that it is being used. Some pubs have already had their licences temporarily suspended and further cases are in the pipeline.

It was explained to me as being somewhat like use of the "sin bin" in rugby matches. When the only sanction a referee had available to him was to send off a player, he tended to use that sanction very rarely and only in the most serious cases. However, when he has available the lesser sanction of the sin bin, where a player was sent off just for a few minutes, that sanction is used more often.

The analogy with pubs is that when the only sanction was to take away a licence, it was not used very often, but the ability to close down a pub temporarily is like the idea of the sin bin. It is a lesser punishment and, because it is not quite so drastic, it can be used more often. It does not permanently deprive the owner of his livelihood or his family investment.

I have no doubt that we could improve the legislation further, but one of the obstacles is the absence of a statutory identity card system. This has been discussed previously and I am not entirely sure that it has to be established on a statutory basis. There may be another way of implementing it. However, there seems to be an enormous resistance, on civil liberty grounds, to bringing in such a scheme, though national identity cards are of course an unquestioned part of life in most of the other EU member states.

Perhaps it is time we did a cost-benefit analysis on this issue to evaluate the gains and loses. If we did, we might well find that the many advantages of an identity card system would outweigh the disadvantages. Maybe we should consider it more fully. For as long as we go on without identity cards, we are putting an unfair and unrealistic burden on those in the front line who have to police age restrictions.

I should declare an interest here because, as a retailer, I am bound by the law against selling to under age customers, not only alcohol but also cigarettes. We have wrestled with this problem for almost as long as I have been in business. In the absence of an identity card, one has to judge whether a person is under age.

Judging a person's age is a notoriously difficult thing to do and it becomes an additional embarrassment when the person doing the judging is also young. We decided to approach this by setting our age limit well above the legal limit, at 25 instead of 18,  but we soon found out that our customers would not stand for that and we changed it slightly some years ago. The signs in our supermarkets now read: 

"If you are lucky enough to look under 25, we need to have proof of your age before selling you alcohol."

We have soldiered along with this approach for many years now, despite the warnings of a friend who takes delight in assuring me that it is unconstitutional. However, it may be sailing somewhat too close to the wind under the Equal Status Act, which makes people more aware of the rights they have in regard to age discrimination.

For as long as we refuse to face up to the identity card issue, any under age law will be a comparatively blunt instrument. However, blunt though it may be, it is clearly a very useful mechanism. There are cases where a publican simply cannot be unaware that certain customers are under age and the law now has an effective way of penalising publicans who serve such young people.

I believe that the law helps to strengthen attitudes. Some years ago, when we were travelling in the USA, an air hostess refused to serve my son a glass of wine with his meal because he was then under 21 years of age. I was most impressed to find that standards were being maintained so strictly in that situation.

As I suggested earlier, we are wrong to expect that we can cope with the problem through our laws alone. There is a massive attitude problem and I am not sure how we can handle it. In recent years, it has become the norm for young people to drink together. They drink in large groups and they often drink to excess. The phenomenon of "binge drinking" is, as far as I know, something new, within the past decade or so. I believe it is a factor in the frightening escalation of violent behaviour among young people. It seems that we are experiencing a different trend in Ireland than elsewhere. Visitors from the US have told me they find it incredible to see so many young people drinking in Ireland, to a far greater extent than in the US.

Perhaps the hard truth is that our society has not taken sufficient care about the way we have relaxed our norms of behaviour. At one time, parental control was strict, especially in the matter of drinking. It was common for people not to take a drink until they were 21. In recent years, we have become more permissive in our attitudes towards the behaviour of young people. Unfortunately, for some people that has gone to the point where parents think that the proper thing to do is to exercise no control at all.

I remember when I first started going to France being surprised and somewhat shocked to find that young children were allowed to drink wine. When I got to know France a little better, I realised that young people were actually being taught how to drink responsibly and moderately. They were given wine only as part of a meal, they were never given more than one glass and often the wine was well diluted. They were taught to regard alcohol as part of daily life, to be used carefully and in moderation. 

Such an approach is better than holding out alcohol to young people as a forbidden fruit which, of course, creates a desire to have it. It is certainly a better approach than allowing young teenagers to drink without controls, or ignoring what one knows is going on once they are out of the house.

Let me give an example of how pervasive our attitudes have become in this regard. Within the past few days, I heard a radio commercial that shocked me because of the attitude it reflected. It was not a commercial for alcohol. It was selling mobile phones, using a young male voice. I regret that I have not got the acting ability to portray the authentic accent.

It ran as follows:

"Ah, it was a brilliant night. There was such a good crowd. You should have come out. Mark was given a load. Aoife got thrown out of the toilet and Nicola fell asleep while some lad was chatting her up. What? No, we lost Helen somewhere with somebody else. And then we all went back to a party. Yeh, and then we could not get a taxi and I ended up walking home."

That was delivered by a young male voice on the radio, and it was not selling alcohol. At first, I thought perhaps it was an advertisement to warn against the pitfalls of alcohol, but it turned out to be an advertisement for mobile phones.

Running underneath all this is the assumption that the norm for a young person's great night out is for a crowd of them to get drunk to the point of unconsciousness. This is taken as so commonplace that, when I complained about the commercial to the chief executive of the company concerned, I was told it had been passed by RTE, that it had nothing to do with drink and that nobody else had complained.

I do not want to single out that company in particular because that is typical of a very widely-held attitude within our community. We should face up to the reality that we are not going to make major inroads into the problem of young people drinking, until we decide to do something about the attitudes which tolerate and, indeed, encourage such behaviour.

Meanwhile, as we wait for attitudes to change, we could do something concrete about the identity card scheme.