I gave up drinking alcohol 15 years ago, feeling, like Billy Connolly, that it would be nice to stop while it was still my own idea. I don't miss it now, or even remember a time when I did, but I recall I was, for a while at least, at a great loss for a social life.
Drink is an inseparable element of social life in Ireland. Indeed, you might unexceptionably write that last sentence without the word "social" in it. I know non-drinkers for whom this doesn't seem to matter - they go in and out of pubs, and join in the parallel life that proceeds in those sanctuaries "of blasphemy and broken glass" (Beckett, I seem to recall), without thinking much of the fact that they do not, as we delicately tend to put it, "take a drink". But for many non-drinkers, and especially those who have with some difficulty given up alcohol, the social sphere can sometimes seem inhospitable.
There is firstly the problem that, for some people who perhaps drink more than they ought to, a non-drinker represents some kind of threat. For such people you become an object of suspicion when you either stop going into pubs, or, having once "taken a drink", continue to go into pubs while declining to accept what will often on such occasions be accusingly referred to as "a real drink".
There is also the boredom factor. Pub conversation has qualities of a cyclical and over-extended nature of which drinkers appear to be completely oblivious. However much one may like or love a particular imbiber of alcohol, there is always a point in the evening when he or she is assumed into what is undoubtedly another dimension. Voices slur or speed up, brain circuits short out in a manner that can be both dazzling and disorientating. And, in the earlier stages of this metamorphosis, the previously referred to sense of threat can unleash at the non-drinker an unsettling type of paranoia, in which the transforming drinker squints at you over his glass and says, "Would you not have yourself a real drink?"
For these and other reasons, I rarely nowadays go into pubs, or, when I do, ensure I am armed with a credible exit strategy.
The public house in Ireland has long been far more than a locus of conviviality and social interchange. It has really been a parallel Ireland in which the hitherto inhospitable reality became blurred and less intimidating, where the normally dissociated emotional life of the society became reintegrated, where the full-on spirit of Ireland was given a toe-to-the-floor workout, and where much that the outdoors culture could not handle was negotiated with something approaching ease. You could drily observe that the pub is where we consume our drug-of-choice, but this would be to sunder drink from its social meaning. It was where our damaged society went to heal.
To be left out, therefore, even on what superficially reads as a voluntary basis, is to suffer a loss that goes much deeper than the normal understanding of the "social". Because of the nature of our relationship with alcohol, we have always had a higher proportion of non-drinkers than other European countries, though the drinking population worked overtime to keep the average intake at a competitive level. To choose or be obliged to abstain is to be partly excluded from the collective soul of Ireland, and sometimes it can seem like a paltry comfort to know that this soul is damaged and still hurting.
I wouldn't be identified as a fan of Michael McDowell, although I do actually admire his intellect and courage.
I have previously criticised him for lack of empathy with the Irish character, though, come to think of it, I have been proved wrong about this as often as vindicated. But I think his proposal to introduce cafe bars is one of the most creative and culturally important ideas any politician has mooted in my lifetime, and, for that reason, believe it should be defended against the short-sighted vested interests currently seeking to bury it.
For here is an idea that, superficially directed at binge drinking, goes to the heart of the culture. It is not that one celebrates the idea of having a pseudo-sophisticated cafe society, or apes the cultural practices of continental Europe.
But, intentionally or otherwise, McDowell's idea of having, in effect, a halfway house between the pub and the great outdoors, offers an opportunity of healing Irish culture, by reintegrating the drinking life of the nation with the non-drinking life.
I believe the fears expressed - for diametrically opposing reasons - by the Department of Health and the vintners' lobby are ill-founded and short-sighted, the former for the reasons already outlined. The belief of publicans that their trade will be detrimentally affected is, I believe, mistaken because of the significant new markets to be won by cafe bars among the non-drinking population.
What may be lost in terms of quantum consumption will be gained in other ways, and the resulting changes in perception and expectation will create new business opportunities for publicans who keep in step with the changing culture.