Easy access ‘fuels’ booze culture

Cllr Níall McNelis (Lab), who is a member of the Galway Healthy Cities Alcohol Forum, said of the 305 alcohol licences in the city, just 117 of those were pubs.

As of August last year, there were 41 retailer off-licences and 29 wine retailer off-licences – with the remainder made up of 90 wine-retailer on-licences (wine bars); 11 special restaurant licences; 15 wholesale dealer; and two manufacturers in the micro-brewery sector.

“I think we really need to have a serious conversation about alcohol in this country and ask ourselves the question – have we too many licences?

“Successive Governments have failed to act on this and, looking at the figures for Galway licences, I think we need to map out the off-licences and look at how many should be in such close proximity to each other,” said Cllr McNelis.

Figures from Revenue show that alcohol consumption dipped by just 7.7% during lockdown, while pubs were closed. Cllr McNelis said this indicated where the problem lay, and it wasn’t with public houses.

“Why were the off-licences allowed to remain open all during lockdown, while the pubs were forced to close? If consumption was only down by 7.8%, you can see where the issue is.

“Don’t get me wrong, the off licences aren’t breaking any laws, but do we have an oversupply of alcohol in our city.

“I would always say that a bar is the safest environment to consume alcohol in – someone having a few drinks in the pub, where there is control over measures and how much you can get served, rather than someone drinking six cans in a short space of time at home, is obviously preferable,” said the Labour councillor.

While the Vintners Federation backed long-mooted legislation to introduce minimum unit-pricing for alcohol, Cllr McNelis believed problem drinking was as much to do with ease of access as it was with pricing.

“I don’t believe that putting 20 cent on a bottle of beer will make much difference – if you look at what the students are drinking, they’re actually buying cheap bottles of wine and mixing it with 7up.

“We have rules about locating fast food restaurants next to schools and yet you can have an off licence wherever you want.

“The City Development Plan for the next number of years will be formulated in the coming months but there’s nothing we can do to change that – it has to come from a national level.

“We have a problem with alcohol in this country – all you have to do is look at all the Communions and Confirmations that were cancelled because of Covid and now that they’re back, we have a return to the drinking sessions afterwards,” said Cllr McNelis.

The delivery of alcohol was also a growing problem, with apps such as Just Eat and Deliveroo now offering the service.

“You can order drink online with no ID, pay by card and it’s delivered to the door. What makes this worse is the only person in breach of the law if it’s sold to an underage person is the delivery driver – the person on a pittance of a wage in the gig economy – not Just Eat or Deliveroo, or even the restaurant who sold it,” said Cllr McNelis.

In a week where student drinking has been in the spotlight, he said binge drinking wasn’t related to any particular age group.

“I was shown CCTV footage of two men in their mid-30s, both langered drunk at 2am on the same night the students were in Spanish Arch, trying to get into a city car park to drive home.

“They were so drunk, they couldn’t actually find the door of the car park and pulled down the barrier instead, doing thousands of euros worth of damage.

“And what’s worse, they came back an hour later and drove out,” he said.