Hatebomb Bulletin #1: A Moderate Proposal

Note: This article was originally written on the 18 December 2000. Alas, strange and hideous upheavals in the lives of the BeerAndLoathing inmates have prevented its wisdom reaching you until now. It will not happen again.

Last week, RTÉ's Prime Time programme tackled the issue of increased alcohol consumption among the Irish population, particularly among the young. Apparently:

Ireland's present alcohol consumption places it second in the world (after Luxembourg); previously, Ireland was a respectable eighth in the World Lush League.
Over 50% of ambulance call-outs are now to fuck-knuckles who've reduced themselves to quivering blobs of jelly through overindulgence of alcohol, placing undue stress on the emergency services and forcing them to bypass more serious incidents in order to ferry stupid bastards who ought to know better to hospital.

This catalogue of shame was of course accompanied by belligerent depositions from the spawn of the Tiger vigorously defending their right to get floothered, make a holy show of themselves in public, and use the State's emergency facilities as a free taxi service. Ah, modern Ireland! what a brood of vicious little thugs you have whelped! Though in fairness they've had to grow up listening to politicians lie about how young people are the country's greatest resource, so you can't blame them for getting ideas above their station.

Now it may puzzle many people that, until recently, Ireland scored relatively low in the alcohol-consumption stakes. After all, there's scarcely a single social occasion which the Irish don't take as an opportunity to pour pints into themselves. And everyone's seen someone on a real Irish bender, be they a barrel-shaped muck savage from Mayo or a sallow-bellied slapper from Sallynoggin: the unfocused eyes, bloodshot and puffy; the emotional flip-flop from self-indulgent mawkishness to shrieking belligerence; the slurred disconnected gibberings of a profundity evident only to the speaker themselves; the constant insistence that they are "all right"... how can the country where people regularly reduce themselves to this score a mere eight on the International Inebriation Index? This paradox is quite easy to explain. Firstly, there's the traditional pattern of Irish drinking. The Irish have tended to be binge drinkers, getting a lot of booze in in very little time, rather than the glass-of-wine-at- each-meal drinking habits of our European neighbours. Even a dozen-pint bender every Friday isn't much when averaged out over the week. Secondly, a large chunk of the Irish population was teetotal until recently, either through being too young to drink or through conscious decision. Temperance and Total Abstinence movements are still popular in Ireland, especially among those old enough to remember the horrors visited on the country by the drink.

Although we would like to think times have changed since those evil days when brutish men drank their wages and battered their wives and children to the stony-faced indifference of Church and State, the sad fact is that the Irish are far too soft on those that make fools and public nuisances of themselves while under the influence, never mind those unspeakable arseholes who kill and maim and injure people week in week out driving while drunk. A raving piss-artist who passes out in the street in a pool of his own ordure will draw half-admiring, half-affectionate glances from the crowd. "Sure, isn't he the terrible man for getting himself in that state, be Jaysus," cluck the women maternally, while concerned men gather about, helping the sprawling grog-fiend to its unsteady feet, quizzing it on its consumption. "What's that? Twenty pints of stout and a bottle of turpentine? Jaysus Mary and Joseph, you're a bad bastard and no mistake! Are you alright? C'mon, you'll need a brandy or two to steady de nerves." Finding themselves thus justified by the public at large and finding ever-ready hands to pick up the wreckage left in their wake, every insane juicehead in the country takes it as a sacred mission to throw back the boundaries on copious consumption and acceptable behaviour.

The most vociferous defenders of this oblivion-chasing culture on the Prime Time programme were members of that twisted mutant society for whom drinking has become an end in itself. Those people for whom it's not a good Friday night unless one has been in a fight, molested some creepy member of the opposite sex, and violently ejected the contents of one's stomach in public before collapsing into fitful, spinning unconsciousness in the back of a taxi. Every sane person knows that being drunk is not pleasant: your speech becomes slurred, your sense of balance becomes erratic, you cannot hold a coherent thought from one moment to the next, you are subject to oscillatory changes of mood, and you begin contemplating sexual congress with individuals you wouldn't spit on sober. And when the whole horrible night comes to its catastrophic close, you lie for hours on your bed, drenched in sweat, stomach churning, eyes glassy and staring into the dark because when you close them, the whole room whirls sickeningly in anticipation of tomorrow's hangover. This is not fun. This is fucking stupid, no matter how you rationalise it, no matter how many specious live-fast-die-young clichés you marshal in your defence. How often have you gotten so wrecked that you end up curled up in a ball, weeping like a baby, willing it to stop? Drinking is a means, not an end. Otherwise you might as well lock yourself in a linen cupboard with a tank of industrial alcohol. Drink is a facilitator, a conduit for social interaction. Being drunk is the most boring pain in the arse I can imagine, but getting drunk? Getting drunk is the most fun you can have with your clothes on, especially when most of the people you get drunk with don't look too hot naked. Getting drunk releases some of the tension in the strings without letting them go altogether. Cleverly managed, you can make this buzz last all night. But there is a significant population of drinkers out there for whom the only measure of a good night is whether you end up face down in a toilet or not.

It must stop! we say. It must stop before the whole country slides off the rim and into the bowl like a pissant's insensate head! We are BeerAndLoathing; we are those who say what others are afraid to say! Down with the "Mammy State" that cossets these bastards! Down with every sad bastard and silly bitch that ever drank themselves into being somebody else's problem! Down with the filthy who turn the streets of Dublin into a Jackson Pollock retrospective! We have the fix for ye, oh yes. We have a solution, arrived at with much exacting cogitation: the Paramilitary Paramedic Squad®.

The PPS is deceptively simple in operation and devastatingly effective in practice. The PPS is a fleet of unmarked vans patrolling the streets in the early morning. Imagine you are Fiachra, UCD graduate and junior fund manager in a large financial house in the IFSC. It is 3am on a cold Sunday morning in Dublin. It is your birthday. You and your gang of Nick Leeson-wannabe mates have been drinking heavily since six o'clock. You are wandering unsteadily towards your expensive penthouse flat in Temple Bar, bumping into post boxes and passersby, waving a lady's thong about your head and singing "Smack My Bitch Up" in a loud nasal voice. You pause momentarily to vomit a thin yellow gruel of export lager and half-digested food into the gutter. You're the king of the world!

Perhaps you are too pissed to hear the screech of brakes, perhaps not, but some animal instinct from some still-functioning corner of your brain makes you look up from your little gift to the people of Dublin. Your booze-blasted eyes strive to focus on the van that's pulled up in front of you. The doors slide open and people start pouring out, people in decontamination suits, people bearing strange implements. Tubes. Funnels. Oh God! You remember those instruments of Hell from a dark night in your past, when you drank too much at a Rag Ball and had to be... pumped out!

You stumble backwards, but in your intoxicated condition you go down like a hamstrung whore. Your head caroms off the cold concrete. Your mates whinny like frightened horses, fear and incomprehension on their fat Foxrock faces. You are surrounded by stomach-pumping devils in decontamination suits! Some are carrying man-clubs and tasers lest your friends think about interfering! Your head is grabbed, the tube forced into your slack ovefed gob... and the ordeal begins! An appreciative crowd gathers as you are cleansed, torrents of nameless juices pouring down the front of your Louis Copeland suit. It goes on perhaps longer than is necessary, before the tubes are withdrawn and you are left gasping on the soiled pavement like a landed fish. The crowd laugh and sneer, clapping appreciatively as you sneeze thick ropes of horrible mucus from your mouth and nose. "Go on, yeh good thing!" yells someone from the back of the crowd.

A gloved hand hauls you to your feet and administers an injection of adrenaline and vitamins with a horse syringe. You howl as cold hideous sobriety descends on your frame in a series of racking shudders. Another hand frisks you, finds your wallet, and extracts a large sum of money before politely presenting you with an itemised bill. Another of your white-suited tormentors is methodically hosing down the pavement with a high-pressure hose, removing all signs of your terrible chastisement. And then they are gone, vanished into the night, leaving you shivering, sober, and drenched in your own filth.

This is what awaits you, my jarhead friends. We've done the calculations. We know it can be done. We will have volunteers aplenty to man our vans. We will have cameras and live feeds to Web sites, where people will pay to see your fat, selfish guts expectorated in glorious Technicolor, to see you twitch when the horse syringe goes in. We will make a profit on this and the greedhead Government that you elected will not be able to resist the greasy wads of spondulicks that we the PPS will offer them to sanction our operations. You are doomed, all of you who think that we're going to put up with your drunken antics for a minute more.