The time has come to ditch the caricature of the "drunken Irish", Archbishop Seán Brady of Armagh has said.
"Has the time not come for us to ditch, once and for all, the caricature of the drunken Irish and to consign it to the realm of history along with the slur of the fighting Irish?" he asked.
"In my opinion, the time certainly has arrived and the beginning of Lent certainly seems an appropriate moment to face the challenge," he said.
Dr Brady was speaking after an Ash Wednesday prayer for Lent ceremony yesterday at Dundalk Institute of Technology, which is in his Armagh diocese.
He said that "last Friday, a new beacon of hope was set alight, fittingly enough under the Fr [ Theobald] Mathew statue in O'Connell Street, Dublin."
He was referring to the launch by Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin and auxiliary Bishop Éamonn Walsh of Dublin of a pastoral letter "Alcohol - the Challenge of Moderation".
It is a letter from the Irish Bishops' Conference. Dr Brady said the letter had been "warmly welcomed as a source of hope, especially with its call for a discussion on the place of alcohol in our culture."
Fr Mathew, a Cork-born Capuchin priest, began a very successful temperance movement in 19th century Ireland.
"Discussion is important - especially well-informed discussion which will lead to action and changes in behaviour. What Ireland now needs is people who model moderation and embody the values of temperance in every aspect of life.
"We need to walk the walk, as well as talk the talk. That is what Jesus did. He never asked others to do something which he himself was not prepared to do," Dr Brady said.
But he warned against fatalism. "We must not surrender to the kind of fatalism that leads to despair, the kind of fatalism that says: 'Ah, sure there is no hope of a change.You know the Irish and the drink! It does not matter what happens, they will go on the same oul way'."
He added that "faith, not fate, is what directs our lives".
