Wasted (24 page)

‘If you’re there at night because you feel it is right to be there, then that gives you an advantage,’ says Thorsted. ‘You can then create an atmosphere of safety in the
area you are in and help prevent violence, misuse and so on. We wear very recognisable luminous jackets so normally children come to us—we don’t have to go to them. We’re seen as
a source of authority, sure, but as a source of positive authority.’

The Night Ravens are present primarily to protect children who have already decided to misuse alcohol, not to address the reason why that abuse occurs in the first place. Or perhaps, in more
cynical terms, they are a very visible marketing presence for Carlsberg in the fight against public disorder and drunkenness.

‘I don’t really accept that argument,’ says Thorsted. ‘We are made up of average adults—there are no Rambos or saviours in the programme. The oldest member is 88.
We give each volunteer an id card which allows them [to] use buses and trains free of charge when they are on duty. We can also provide insurance and all mobile phones are provided by the Lions
Club.’ During his decade in charge, Thorsted has noticed changes in the demographic of alcohol abusers. ‘We used to focus on the sixteen to twenty age groups, but for past four years
the focus is on ten to eighteen-year-olds. That is worrying.’ So, the question is, could the initiative work in Ireland and how much of it is for pr purposes?

It’s Friday night in central Copenhagen, and I’m standing outside a teenage disco. On the ground near me is a 14-year-old girl who is vomiting repeatedly. She is wearing high heels
and a pair of hot-pants. It’s -2ºc. Her hand is bleeding following a fall, and two of her friends hold her hair back from her face. Several drunk and loudmouthed teenage boys, like crows
pecking at a milk bottle, gather round. From the basement disco, other teenagers are led outside to get air and sober up. Inside, roughly half the teenagers present are drunk, despite the fact that
the club sells 1 per cent alcohol in an attempt to promote low-alcoholic alternatives. Up until two years ago, there was no age limit on buying alcohol in off-licence premises in Denmark. Many of
these teenagers will bring a change of clothes with them, changing in public toilets near the La Scala entertainment venue, exposing as much bare flesh as possible without their parents ever
knowing. ‘We tell our parents we go outside to a house with our friends,’ one youth tells me.

I’ve tagged along with a Night Ravens group of three volunteers, who remain outside. One of them has called the intoxicated 14-year-old girl’s stepmother, and the group waits until
someone arrives to take her home. ‘I guess she had some vodka,’ a 15-year-old friend says. ‘The club starts about ten o’clock and goes on until late. I wouldn’t like
to be at her stepmom’s house at breakfast tomorrow!’ All the kids seem to have respect for the Night Raven workers, cemented, of course, by the free sweets and condoms the workers hand
out. It definitely wouldn’t work in Ireland, then!

Mainly the volunteers themselves are middle-aged parents who are concerned with the way their city is turning out and who have a strong sense of social responsibility. The youngest volunteer
tells me he is training to be a social worker, and ironically enough, when he’s not doing a good deed, he’s a bouncer in nightclubs. ‘The problem is that they [the kids] are
starting earlier. When I was young we were not drinking until about sixteen or eighteen. Today, the kids start at twelve or thirteen and stay out all night. The parents don’t seem to care.
It’s easy for young people to get drinks in bars—if you have the looks and the money, then sure.’

As we wait, young kids continue to limp, stumble and crawl out of the teenage disco, all bare-chested bravado, smudged mascara and torn tights, as friends try to sober them up in anticipation of
the return home. The volunteer says the majority of the blame should rest on parents and not on the children themselves. ‘When I am wearing the yellow jacket it is a whole different world.
It’s a good reaction. Most of the kids need a grown-up to talk with. For many of the young people the parents don’t care. If the parents did care then they wouldn’t allow their
kids to run around the streets drinking and yelling and wearing short skirts.’ I wonder how the volunteers react when someone they come across is in a distressed state and requires medical
assistance. ‘We try to get in contact with their family. If they are drunk we call the police or ambulance. When they know we are calling then they come,’ said one of the Night
Ravens.

Other kids I talk to say there is not much pressure on children to drink at a young age in Copenhagen. Most do, but crucially, those that don’t say they can go to parties and drink
minerals and not feel left out. The volunteers take me to see shop windows where alcopops and minerals are sold side by side and point out that it’s these types of premises that are allowing
children easy access to alcohol with few restrictions in place.

The Night Ravens are, if nothing else, a novel way of patrolling the problem, although finding adults with time to volunteer is their biggest challenge. How many Irish parents would be willing
to give up their Friday or Saturday nights in order to hold the hands and hair of drunken teens in Temple Bar?

Although it’s not like they’re queuing up to volunteer in Copenhagen either. ‘We have only about twenty-five volunteers in the whole city of Copenhagen,’ one of the older
volunteers told me. ‘We have a lot of parents in the block where I live and I mentioned this to them, and said, “Why not come and join us and try it?” The answers are “We
don’t have time” or “I have to be home with the kids” and all that. So it’s very hard getting volunteers in a city. Some of the ones we have are coming from thirty
kilometres away. I think I am one of the only ones who live in the city centre who also volunteer. I do it to make a difference. I like to go in town and drink beer sometime but I see a lot of
people fighting and causing trouble. I don’t want to see that.’

Closer to 1 a.m., in another part of the city centre, we meet 16-year-old Sinit and a friend, out for the night. I asked them what young people’s attitudes towards drinking were.
‘Some people don’t control themselves and drink a lot. But I know a lot of young people who can control themselves so I think it’s okay. I think it’s okay to drink at
sixteen. The Night Ravens’ attitude is kind of respected. It’s very easy to get drink here. At fifteen, I went to a club where you had to be twenty-one. There were a lot of guys buying
me drink, as well as the bar staff! In shops, if they are old ladies, they might not let you buy drink, but anywhere else there is no problem. At a party, though, there’s not really pressure
to drink if you’re in the right company. Everyone knows about the free sweets and condoms. Maybe it’s different in Ireland?’

——

In a secondary school in County Clare, I arranged to spend time with a group of Leaving Certificate children. The principal and some of the staff organised my visit on
condition I didn’t divulge the name of the school, which I agreed to. At the school itself, I was keen to hear how attitudes had changed since my adolescent days in the same region, a decade
or more earlier, and to compare notes with the Danish adolescent experience. What I was struck by was the fact that seemingly little discussion takes place in secondary schools around alcohol
issues in Ireland. The children I met, mostly 16–18-year-olds, told me my visit was one of only a handful of times they had ever discussed alcohol in a school setting.

It’s not something, in retrospect, that surprised me all that much. I remember in my own school days the only real discussion on addiction was when we were all herded into the computer
room early one morning, without warning, where a hardened Dublin heroin addict told us his story. Now, for secondary school students in the west of Ireland, a hardened Dublin heroin addict was
about as far outside our cultural reference points as an Islamic shoe bomber would be to a class of trainee Texas Rangers. So, aside from the initial shock value of hearing about needles on skin
and so on, it had little meaningful effect. At least with the movie
Trainspotting
, there was a soundtrack we could relate to. Of far more symbolic significance were the nights out with
teachers towards the end of Leaving Certificate, such as the Graduation Mass, when students and teachers mingled in a bar afterwards. One teacher drank beer out of a cup that had been won by the
one of the school sports teams. We egged him on as he took an extra-long sup of the stagnant lager, and afterwards students and some teachers all made their way to the local disco together. But
this was in the early 1990s, when only a fraction of the statistical research into alcohol abuse existed. Teachers and students alike could be partly admonished for not knowing any better—yet
nowadays there seems little excuse.

The first question I asked was, at what age did the students feel it was okay to start drinking? In the majority of cases, the answer was 15, and often with parental consent.

‘My parents would know where I was and so on. I would come home sober usually. It wasn’t a problem,’ said one girl. In terms of getting access to alcohol in the local town, the
general feedback was that there was little trouble. ‘You might be stopped for id or that but there’s always some ways to get around that,’ said another girl. One of the lads in
the class commented, ‘There’s never really that much of a problem getting drink from whatever age you want to get it.’

Of the class of 19, I asked for a show of hands as to who went out regularly, and all but five put their hands up (two in the class abstained from alcohol completely). Four in the class said
they were allowed drink at home. ‘When we are sixteen or seventeen our parents have no problem with us drinking. I was fifteen when I started,’ said another girl.

One girl, prompted by the others, gave an account of her drinking life, which often occurred at home with parental consent: ‘I drink at home. I started when I was fourteen or that way and
it was only small bits, but now it’s getting more. Now I’m sixteen. I drink cans no bother at home. I might have about six or seven cans and that would be no problem with my parents. I
go to pubs also. They don’t want me out in fields.’ When I asked if the school had promoted debate around alcohol-related issues, one of the guys said, ‘In school there is no
awareness around the issues. All we had is a questionnaire asking do we drink. But what can be done? Most of us drink and with it so cheap now—can get three cans for a
fiver—there’s not much school can do or say about it.’

Later, I handed out a survey to all Leaving Certificate students in the school, and asked them to fill it out overnight. It contained 11 questions, asking about drinking patterns both within the
adolescent group and their wider family, how much money was spent weekly on alcohol among the group and whether or not Ireland was becoming a more café-orientated society.

Of the 66 students who filled in the questionnaire, 40 per cent felt there is peer pressure on them and their peers to drink alcohol, while 60 per cent felt it is up to the individual. Of those
who answered the question ‘Could you envisage not drinking alcohol as an adult?’ 38 per cent said they could, while 62 per cent felt they would drink alcohol when older.

When asked, finally, if alcohol had ever affected the students or their families adversely, 40 per cent said it had, while 59 per cent said it had no effect. From those who said it had a
negative effect the comments included ‘My parents divorced because my mother became an alcoholic and couldn’t raise the family’ and ‘My uncle likes to take a few too many
drinks, and it upsets my Granny which upsets me.’ Another said, ‘I have an uncle that has problems with alcohol, and after seeing him it turned me off binge drinking’ while
another said, ‘One of my Grandfathers died from liver failure due to alcohol and also my uncle is a recovering alcoholic.’ Asked whether or not the students thought Irish people drink
too much, one answered, ‘Yes, nightlife in Ireland is famous worldwide and we are developing too much of a bad reputation.’ On a lighter note, one respondee said, ‘No, I
don’t think the Irish drink too much. We are widely perceived as alcoholics by the Americans, but what do they know? I mean, most of them think we have leprechauns.’

——

The Aislinn Drug and Alcohol Rehabilitation Centre in Ballyragget, County Kilkenny, is the only place in Ireland where youngsters under 21 can receive residential treatment for
addiction. It has a total of 14 beds, and that has to cater for a wide range of addictions, from eating disorders to drug and drink issues and also gambling. Some of those beds are taken up by the
HSE
, and others by the probation services, which leaves only a handful of beds for the wider population. Last October, 91 children were on waiting lists to get into the
centre for treatment in an attempt to get their lives back on track. The centre struggles for funding and has been trying for years to get government assistance. Thus far its efforts have fallen on
deaf ears. The Alcohol Taskforce Report had made recommendations that some of the considerable excise gained from alcohol sales in Ireland should be put towards treatment services such as the Aislinn Centre, but this recommendation was not taken up. (Public health officials have said privately that the
Department of Finance didn’t like the idea of other government sectors dictating how excise was spent.) When I asked the Minister of State with responsibility for health promotion within the
Department of Health, Mary Wallace, about the centre and its lack of beds and funding, she said, ‘I’m not familiar about what happens in Kilkenny, I can only talk about my own
community.’ The public health lobby will say her reply could be interpreted as indicative of wider government ambivalence towards the need for comprehensive treatment services for young
people in Ireland. Or perhaps the question should be this: given the wealth of statistical information showing how binge-drinking and rising alcohol-related harm have impacted on Ireland’s
young people, is it good enough that the government minister with responsibility for health promotion within the Department of Health only knows about her own community?