Myth or Fact

This is the article the whole series was built to reach, and the answer is not the one either side wants.

The Irish were never a nation of heavy drinkers by volume, and the people who said so were repeating prejudice rather than counting anything.

The Irish are, and have long been, exceptional in how they drink rather than how much.

And for about a decade, recently, inside living memory, the old caricature came true.

All three of those are supported by figures. Take them in order.

1617. Where the story starts

The stereotype is older than any statistic and it was never built on one.

It runs from antiquity, through the English travel writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who found the Irish barbarous and filthy in their diet, through the eighteenth century improvers who toured the country and pronounced on the wretchedness of the peasantry, and into the nineteenth century where it hardened into something with a job to do.

The job was justifying the Union. A people who cannot govern themselves need governing, and a drunk is the easiest possible illustration.

Then the Famine exported it. Two million people arrived in Britain and America poor, Catholic, and unwanted, and the cartoon followed them and got worse. From the 1930s American psychiatrists were recording disproportionate Irish admissions in Boston and New York, and a Harvard sociologist built a cultural theory on top of it. [1]

Not one strand of that chain begins with a measurement.

1890. What the measurements say

Here is per capita consumption around 1890, in litres of pure alcohol.

France 16.3. Switzerland 13.3. Belgium 13.1. Italy 11.8. Germany 9.8. The United Kingdom 8.7. The Netherlands 5.7. The United States 5.3. [2]

Ireland does not appear separately because Ireland was inside the United Kingdom figure of 8.7, and Irish consumption sat below the British average rather than above it.

So at the height of the era that produced the drunken Irishman, a Frenchman was drinking close to twice what anybody in the United Kingdom was drinking, and the Irish were at the lower end of that.

In the 1970s a social scientist at University College Dublin, Joyce Fitzpatrick, established the same thing for her own era. The Irish in Ireland were drinking less than the average Englishman, and ethnicity was not a significant factor in drinking behaviour at all. Fifty years of research since has agreed with her. [3]

On volume, the stereotype is simply false, and has been false for as long as anyone has been counting.

2018. What is actually unusual

Now the part that is true, and it has nothing to do with volume.

A quarter of Irish adults, 25.3 per cent, drank no alcohol at all in the year before they were surveyed. In England the figure is about 18 per cent and in Scotland about 16.

Of the Irish adults who do drink, 39.2 per cent drink heavily in a single sitting at least once a month.

And on that measure Ireland ranked eighth out of one hundred and ninety four countries in a World Health Organisation analysis. [4]

Those two facts together are the whole thing.

The Irish average is unremarkable because it is an average of two populations that barely overlap. A very large body of people who take nothing, and a drinking population that drinks in concentrated bursts rather than in daily glasses.

A French average of 16.3 litres described a man having wine with his dinner most evenings. An Irish average of 9.5 describes a quarter of the country having nothing ever and a good part of the rest having eight drinks on a Saturday.

Same arithmetic. Completely different countries.

2001. The one time it was true

And now the uncomfortable part, which has to be said because the point of this series is to report what the record shows.

Irish consumption climbed steeply through the 1990s, from about 10.5 litres per adult in 1989, and reached 14.3 litres in 2001. [5]

That was the highest figure ever recorded in Ireland and it put the country near the top of the developed world. Ireland was still ninth highest in the OECD as late as 2018.

So a caricature invented by hostile travel writers in the seventeenth century, applied to a country that did not deserve it for three hundred years, became broadly accurate around the turn of this century.

Money did it. Not culture, not religion, not history. Sustained full employment and rising disposable income in a country that had never had either.

Which ought to be read alongside the rest of this site. The West of Ireland did not drink heavily in 1890 for the same reason it did not marry. There was no money.

2024. Where it stands now

Consumption has fallen by 34.3 per cent since the peak, to 9.49 litres per adult in 2024. Ireland now sits at about the European average, behind France, Spain and Austria among others. [6]

But the shape has not changed. The abstention rate is still high. The binge rate is still eighth in the world.

So the honest verdict.

Myth, on volume, for three centuries, and the myth had a political job.

Fact, on pattern, for as long as the pattern has been measured, and the pattern is the part that does the damage. A country that drinks 9.5 litres in bursts is not healthier than one that drinks 12 litres with dinner.

And true, briefly and recently, in the one period nobody includes in the stereotype, because the stereotype is about the past and that decade was about prosperity.

The Irish reputation for drink is wrong about the volume, wrong about the cause, wrong about the era, and right about the thing it never actually described.