On Wednesday we celebrate our Irishness and what it is to be Irish. But surveys show that we are a nation of over-educated, drunk, obese, stressed-out couch potatoes. Shurely shome mishtake, asks Shane Hegarty
Hey, slob. Yes, you. You drunken fatso. You could be called a walking heart attack, but that would imply that you regularly go out and do some exercise. You eat badly and you take too many drugs. You must be Irish. Happy St Patrick's Day.
If the Irish have a fragile collective ego, then this was not a good week to be reading the newspapers. The Government has told us that it is time to shape up. The average Irish person has gained a stone over the past decade.
The EU told us that it is time to sober up. According to this week's Eurobarometer survey, our image as the alcoholics of Europe is fully borne out by the statistics: we drink twice as much as the average European. We spend 10 times as much on booze as the Greeks. It's worth noting that these figures are from 1999, but they follow an earlier EU survey that claimed that we abuse more amphetamines and ecstasy than any other nation.
Meanwhile, RTÉ told us that one million people sat in to watch the final of You're A Star last weekend. We've been told, then, that we are a nation of layabouts, slouched in front of the telly or on a barstool. In the same week in which we were told there would be a referendum on Irish citizenship, the conspiracy theorist might wonder if all this bad press is a clever ploy to encourage the huddled masses to turn around and go somewhere else.
And yet, we pay little heed to all of this. The surveys keep telling us that we've never been worse, yet we keep retorting to them that we've never felt better. Some 86 per cent of us believe that we live healthy, balanced lives. We look in the mirror, but where the Government sees Homer Simpson, we see Charles Atlas.
If you were to look at the Irish through statistics alone, you would get a confused image of our identity. We are on a road to ruin, but we seem to be whistling our way there. Certainly, there are some unsavoury figures: 12 per cent of women and 14 per cent of men are clinically obese. In all, over half of us are overweight. We eat the third highest amount of calories a day of any EU country. The scale of the problem facing the Department of Health is perhaps best illustrated in the statistic that informs us of how four out of every 10 people don't know what the term "obesity" actually means.
Some 86 per cent also say they eat a balanced diet, which is the second-highest rate in the EU, even though 15 per cent of Irish children never eat breakfast during the week. At any one time, 13 per cent of us are on a diet.
Yet, we actually feel better about our health than they do in sporty Australia. Perhaps it is because almost one in 10 of us are now regular sunbed users, so helping us keep our sunny outlook. Whatever it is, we seem largely impervious to the shocking fact that we have the lowest life expectancy in the EU: 73 years for men and 78.5 years for women.
What makes that limited lifespan even harder to take is that we also have the latest retirement age (63.1 years). And while we're working, we're coming under increasing pressure. According to Amárach Consulting, there is now a widespread "time famine", with three in four 35 to 45-year-olds agreeing that they "never have enough time to get things done". We see less of the ones we love, with six in 10 young married couples both working. We also work longer hours than most: the average hours worked per week in the Republic was 37.2 compared with 35 in Northern Ireland. Overall, a third of us feel that we are too tired to enjoy life after work and 40 per cent say that they often feel stressed.
Are we concerned? Hardly. Nine out of 10 of us are generally satisfied in our jobs but, more amazingly, two-thirds of us say that we would continue to work even if we were wealthy enough not to bother.
If you work in education you are most likely to be happy in your job. You are least likely to be so if you work in the hospitality industry.
We believe that we have a better educational system than most other developed countries, and there is certain merit in this. The number of Irish people with a third-level qualification is the fifth highest in Europe. Irish 15-year-olds are ranked fifth of 27 OECD states in reading literacy, although boys are third from bottom for leisure reading. The distraction might be obvious: only Japan has a higher proportion of Playstations per household than we do.
On the whole, we worry about different things to the rest of Europe. The three issues that most concern us are crime, the health service and the cost of living. Of those, only crime registers across the rest of Europe.
Perhaps it is because the surveys show that we feel closer in economic, cultural and social terms to Boston than we do to Berlin. Yet, we think the British are jolly old sorts too, according to a recent survey that showed that attitudes are not so antagonistic as presumed. In fact, on the whole, the statistics suggest that we are quite an outward-looking people. With the referendum now planned, it's worth noting that 80 per cent of us believe that Ireland needs immigrants in order to continue the economy's growth.
Only the Luxembourgers are more enthusiastically European than we are, and the Irish are the only people whose support for the EU has grown over the past year. However, we are also the most Euro-ignorant. More Irish admit to not knowing enough about the proposed EU constitution than do any other nation.
Yet, for all our embracing of Europe, green blood runs through our veins.
Only the Greeks have a higher sense of national pride than the Irish do. 71 per cent of us feel very proud to be Irish and a further 25 per cent feel fairly proud; 40 per cent of Europeans identify exclusively with their nationality, but 49 per cent of Irish people identify themselves exclusively as Irish.
That does not make us a trusting lot. According to the Diageo Quality of Life in Ireland report survey, only 2 per cent of us have a great deal of confidence in government. Neither are we that bothered about changing it: Ireland has the fourth-lowest turnout among EU countries in national parliamentary elections.
There are some that we look up to. The comforting words "Trust me, I'm a doctor" seem to have had a considerable impact. Doctors are considered our most important professionals. When an MRBI/RTÉ poll last year asked people "how important you feel their services are to the community in general?", doctors were followed in rank by teachers, gardaí, priests, solicitors and politicians.
At the bottom of the list, with only 21 per cent of support, were journalists - which suggests that almost 80 per cent of all Irish people will have paid little heed to the statistics in this article.