There are those who insist that the proposed lifting of the Good Friday drinking ban will be an important step in normalising Ireland’s troubled relationship with alcohol.
In the arguments about the Seanad bill tabled on Wednesday which would allow pubs to open on Good Friday from 2018, it has been said that the manner in which Ireland approaches this 24-hour shutdown needs to be corrected and that abolishing the drink ban will contribute to a normalisation in these matters.
Nobody should ever anticipate a normalisation in this country’s complicated entanglements with drink.
Indeed the process of allowing pubs to open more often, while perhaps counter-intuitively brilliant, would not seem to be an obvious first step on that journey towards normalisation.
There is no doubt, however, that the manner in which Ireland collectively deals with the closure of pubs on Good Friday could be said to be a fine example of whatever the opposite of normalisation is.
Few things shine a light on Ireland’s issues with drink more than the sight of people wheeling trolleys full of beer away from off licences on Holy Thursday, before they return to collect their trolleys full of spirits.
In these moments, they are doing what comes naturally to people with a certain type of disposition: they are preparing for all eventualities, as long as all the eventualities involve drink. There is a crushing logic to their actions: they are simply ensuring they are well stocked for the 24 hours to come, for the 24 hours to come after that and, maybe, if some unexpected state of emergency is declared, for another 24 hours after that.
Yet, like Enoch Powell, they are driven mad by the remorselessness of their own logic. But the logic is not simply functioning on Holy Thursday, it is present the whole year round. Holy Thursday simply brings into the open thought processes they manage to keep hidden the rest of the year.
In the desperate hours of Maundy Thursday, there is a great terror in the hearts of many Irish people, a sense that the lamps are going out across the land and we will not see them lit again in our lifetimes or, lit, at least, until the following day when the pubs will open as normal.
Some of these people may welcome a normalisation of their habits, an opportunity to drink away from what one supporter of the bill called an uncontrolled environment. If the ban was lifted they could enter what you could call a controlled environment or what most of us would call ‘a pub’.
In all my years of research, I was never prevented from getting drunk by anyone in a position of authority who was in charge of regulating this controlled environment. True, I was often prevented from getting even more drunk in this controlled environment.
By that stage, however, it was invariably too late. But I bear no ill will to the barmen who allowed this to happen, certainly compared to the ill will I would have borne them if they hadn’t allowed it to happen.
Their interventions often only took place so the people who were merely normally drunk could get on with their drinking, free from the presence of someone who was abnormally drunk.
The argument in favour of opening up these controlled environments says that the publicans should take a hold of this day when, according to one senator, “people are drinking more on Good Friday than they do on any other Friday”. And that’s saying something.
It is the unsupervised drinking that has led people into difficulties, according to this analysis. This practice is often referred to as pre-drinking which, it seems, is simply another word for drinking.
Good Friday could be said, by this definition, to be the place where pre-drinking began. A day devoted to pre-drinking in places other than the pub before drinking as normal can resume on Easter Saturday.
Of course, we have another national holiday where pubs are open and which hasn’t led to the normalisation of anything. They used to be closed on St Patrick’s Day too, which led Brendan Behan to remark that Ireland was the only country in the world in which the bars shut at fiesta time.
The opening of pubs on the national holiday hasn’t led to the normalisation of much except public vomiting so perhaps we have some way to travel on that journey too.
Behan could be said to have had skin in the game and he would be dismissed today as a member of a lobby group with a vested interest.
Like many artists, Behan used the hostile environment to create his masterpieces. All art prospers in testing conditions and Good Friday has led to its own body of work, stretching the ingenuity of the Irish people, who can often be seen taking an otherwise unnecessary day trip to Holyhead in an attempt to get around the drinking ban.
Last year, there was much rejoicing when Ireland played at the Aviva on Good Friday, which allowed spectators to drink contentedly while reflecting solemnly on the Way of Sorrows, otherwise known as watching Ireland play a friendly.
We will endure all levels of boredom to ensure we can get a drink and in those moments we learn much about ourselves.
These challenges and curiosities shouldn’t be abandoned too easily, especially as we know one thing about the next step – whatever it is, it won’t be normal.
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