We are not doing well when it comes to healthy lifestyles. Despite decades of antismoking propaganda, one in three adults is a smoker. About one in four of us takes more alcohol than the recommended "sensible" limit. We have begun to stop exercising by the age of 15 and we exercise less and less as we get older - which, of course, is when we need it the most.
Not surprisingly, our life expectancy is below average for the EU. At age 40, the average Irishman can expect to live another 35 years or so, the fourth-lowest life expectancy in the EU. The average Irishwoman can expect almost another 40 years - the second-lowest in the EU.
To counter our slide into slobdom, the Minister for Health and Children yesterday published a health promotion strategy for the next five years.
It's a difficult strategy to get a hold of. It is strong on "facilitating," "promoting", "working in partnership" and suchlike but it is short on the objectives to be met as a result of all this laudable activity.
It does not tell us the extent of change which the strategy should bring about in the next five years.
For instance, it tells us that alcoholic disorders account for 27 per cent of all male admissions to psychiatric hospitals - but it does not tell us what the target figure is for 2005 or even 2010.
Instead it promises such measures as "to work in partnership to inform the development of a plan for men's health" and "to facilitate the development and implementation of current health promotion initiatives aimed at men".
Perhaps it is unfair to ask for specific health targets - and in relation to health promotion it is probably impossible to predict what statistical effect a health campaign on drinking will have on hospital admissions.
Yet specific targets could put an edge on the working of health boards and other bodies charged with achieving them.
Similarly, for young people, the strategy promises, among other things, "to develop national health promotion initiatives specifically focussed at young people".
That's grand, but what do we want to achieve? Should we aim to reduce teenage suicide by 10 per cent over the next five years? Not enough, you may say, but what would we have to do to reduce it by 10 per cent, let alone a higher figure? The need to answer that could, perhaps, put a sharper focus on the plans which will be drawn up by the bodies involved in combating teenage suicide.
This is not to dismiss the value of what is being proposed. But what is being proposed might be more valuable with specific targets attached.
One of the more interesting measures in the strategy is the "health proofing" of policy. What this seems to mean is that if, say, Charlie McCreevy wants to cut the excise duty on drink by 30 per cent, the proposal will have to go to a "health proofing" sub-committee of the Cabinet before it goes to the Cabinet itself.
The Cabinet sub-committee would, it seems fair to assume, oppose the idea of the reduction and a much-modified proposal would go to the Cabinet table in the end.
The same could apply to proposals on, say, GM foods, speed limits, the promotion of sports, the housing of Travellers (and where is the national Travellers' health strategy we were promised in 1995?) and other issues which impact on health.
Incidentally, this is the third type of "proofing" introduced by the State. All policies will now be gender-proofed, poverty-proofed and health-proofed, though not, one hopes, GUBU-proofed.
Overseeing health promotion at national level will be the National Health Promotion Forum. This will be chaired by the Minister himself and will include a wide range of interests which, in the language beloved of this document, "will facilitate an inter-sectoral approach to addressing the major determinants of health". No doubt it will also be "multi-disciplinary" in nature.
It is easy to laugh at the jargon but the forum has a major job on its hands if it is to improve the health of the people.
Consider smoking. Anti-smoking strategies have been in place since the 1970s, we all know of the toll which smoking takes on life and hundreds of thousands of Irish people have watched a loved one die from the effects of smoking.
In the light of that it is astonishing that, for instance, one in five of the nine to 17 age group is a smoker, and that just over three in 10 adults is a regular or occasional smoker.
Even given that smoking is addictive, how is it possible that years of propaganda and price increases have had such little effect? The example of cigarette smoking illustrates a key point about health promotion: we all agree with the concept of leading healthier lives but making us buckle down to doing it is a tough job indeed.
The thought of a healthy life, lived longer is, for too many of us, less of a lure than the immediate pleasure of the next cigarette, the next drink, an armchair and a remote control.
pomorain@irish-times.ie