Politicians will drive you to drink faster than advertising ever could

We’re a great nation to use a sledgehammer to crack a nut – an approach clearly illustrated in the latest effort by some politicians to take drink sponsorship out of sport.

Apparently, we cannot be trusted to behave ourselves because the mere mention of drink sends us into orbit like Pavlov’s dog or Father Jack to the point where we can no longer remember our own names.
No, we are so overwhelmingly influenced by advertising that the most tenuous link between a sport we love and a drink of the alcoholic kind will have us pouring it down our necks until our liver gives out.

Our holier-than-thou politicians want to ban the drinks industry from paying out a slice of its fortune to support sport because it’s only a cynical exercise to force fit young sports people to turn to the drink.
According to that great champion of due process, Ming Flanagan alcohol sponsorship of sport is ‘twisted’ – as opposed to having penalty points quietly quashed, which presumably merely qualifies as great oul’ craic altogether.

Ming – the self-confessed cannabis smoker – thinks there should be a ‘total and utter’ ban on alcohol sponsorship ‘whether that be in sport or other walks of life’.

“It is twisted, the idea that you would have alcohol and sport connected,” he told a recent gathering of the Oireachtas Transport and Communications Committee.

Actually, the chances are this sort of political posturing is infinitely more likely to drive the nation to drink than advertising ever would.

This was a meeting to which the Federation of Irish Sport, Horse Racing Ireland and the Drinks Industry Group of Ireland had been summoned to discuss the implications of possible legislation to ban the sponsorship of major sporting events by drinks companies.

Eamon Coghlan was the man to put it into some perspective – a world champion and Olympian who grew up using the Guinness pool for training….and who has only ever drank one pint of Guinness in his life.

In other words, he probably swallowed more of the chlorine in Guinness pool than the barley in the Guinness pint – so clearly the influence of drink isn’t as all-prevailing as Ming might like to think.

Anyway, by the same yardstick, shouldn’t we be protesting at Cadbury’s sponsorship of U21 football championship – because too much chocolate can make you fat and clearly we haven’t the whit to know when to stop.

The value of drink sponsorship was €35 million last year, while, by comparison, the total budget of the Irish Sports Council this year is €43 million. That illustrates the hole that would be left if the ‘sackcloth and ashes’ brigade get their way.

But more to the point, when did advertising become so supremely powerful that mere word association was enough to send us scurrying like mice after free cheese?

Of course it works – or we in the media had better hope it does before we’re out of work – but people are discerning enough to see it with some sense of perspective.

Yes, teenagers buy boots because they’re endorsed by Gareth Bale or Steven Gerrard; they buy clothes that their musical or sporting heroes wear – but it’s not so powerful that it triumphs over free will.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.