Alex White’s Statement on Diageo’s ‘Arthur’s Day’

“There is a serious problem, not only with the amount of alcohol we drink, but also with the harmful patterns in which it is consumed.

“Our accident and emergency departments, our Garda stations and the streets of our cities and towns are in the front line of public drunkenness and alcohol-related harm.

“It seems to me that Diageo has invented Arthur’s Day as a pseudo national holiday for the purposes of marketing its products – especially to young people – thereby stimulating greater consumption of alcohol.

“Regrettably, there are too many days of the week and of the year on which over-consumption of alcohol is a real problem, and we do not need to contrive another.

The hard truth about alcohol in Ireland is that we drink too much and we drink in too harmful a way. The only safe public health message is to reduce the amount of alcohol that we drink as a nation. Doing so is the only means of reducing the harm to our health and to our society caused by alcohol.”