Drinking is our choice
by Brendan Coffey
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“I’m sick of being made to feel unwelcome in there. You’re being roared at to get out as soon as it reaches closing time and then you’re being shoe-horned into a too full, too loud disco bar that suits everyone except the punter. I just want to finish my pint in peace.”
I was complaining but that’s nothing new. Irish pubs have become uniform when once they were individuals with their own faults, warts and expressions. Where you drank said something about you, now it’s telling you to get the fuck off its premises.
Why? If alcohol is the problem why did the pubs have to change? Pubs are about more than alcohol but then they’re the ones that still have loyal customers. The era of the superpub has meant that we’ve encouraged binge drinking by changing our pubs. It’s the superpub that needs to be punished, not the punter and definitely not the pub.
TwentyMajor (I’m becoming a bit of a fan) is having a rant about teenagers and the fact that you can’t buy a drink in an off-licence after 10pm now. And he’s right, it’s all bollocks. Binge drinking will always happen, even in the most sanguine of places, it’s our choice whether we want to binge drink or not and no law or moral compulsion can ever change that.
More often we succeed in spite of our parents, not because of them. It’s time we put responsibility back on the individual. If I want to enjoy the pub why can’t I?
If binge drinking makes me a menace to others then punish me, not people who binge drink and stumble home, they’re punishment is the mess they’re cleaning up in the morning and the sickness they’ll feel all day. Fine me, make me pay for my pleasure. Then we might make people think about the pain before indugling in the pleasure, we are a species afterall, we are driven by primal instincts. If we learn that the pain is unbearable then we’ll cut back on excessive pleasure, which is what binge drinking is.
We’ve been learning like that since we were born.
