If you happen to be fond of having the occasional drink at home whilst sitting with your feet up and enjoying whatever is on the box you could very soon end up paying the price for a few hours of leisurely time if the Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has his way.
According to reports today Mr Varadkar is all set to plough ahead with plans that will see supermarkets and shops being forced to place a very high excise duty on large quantities of cheap alcohol such as beer and spirits.
Mr Varadkar who will amend the Public Health Bill before this year’s Budget claims Ireland must change its image and eliminate binge drinking once and for all and in order to do so the price of large quantities of cheap alcohol must be increased.
The Taoiseach who who recently spoke to the Irish Daily Mail also claimed that: “We the Irish people all should drink less booze as it is a mind bending drug.”
Speaking to the paper Mr Varadkar said: “Where we are going is somewhere different in the Public Health (Alcohol) Bill, which will be enacted before the end of the year”.
“That will do a number of things: it is trying to make alcohol less visible, because it almost treated now like a normal grocery product, when we all know it isn’t, it’s a mind-bending drug that makes us all do things we shouldn’t do and say things we wouldn’t otherwise say, and we all need to drink a lot less of it.”
“Crucially, it (The Bill) will also introduce minimum unit pricing and what that is designed to do is not to increase the price of wine and spirits and beer across the board, but to get rid of the very cheap beers and spirits which facilitate people drinking to excess.”
The Taoiseach added: “It is not about making the bottle of wine you drink with your pizza more expensive, or the glass of wine you have in the pub.”
“But it is about getting rid of people who buy huge amounts of alcohol at very low prices and getting extremely drunk.”