Why everybody should get drunk

Well, St Patrick’s Day is nearly on us again, and I think it’s high time to get it back on track. The issue, of course, is drunkenness, but the scandal, to me, on that most holy of days, is not the inebriation, but the sobriety.

In times long gone, in places as far flung as Cleopatran Egypt, the Caliphate of Iran and Socratic Greece, festivals of absolute and total steamheadedness took place a few times a year, and were seen as a good thing.

A day or three would be set aside, and people would relentlessly drink themselves toward unconsciousness. Rather than it being the sign of ill health and repression, it strikes me as a signifier of grace. The ability to let go and lose control — not just as individuals, but as an entire tribe — is a mark of true wisdom. It is to understand life and our limits, and to fall back into a childlike state of helplessness.

But these are the days of the New Puritan (they come disguised as Liberals). Orthodoxies of behaviour and thought, and a hysterical chorus of speech police waiting to pounce and destroy. Times are tight and getting tighter. The more conservative society becomes, the more anti-social drunkenness is.

Ageing nowadays is something to be fought against rather than accepted. Work is ruthless and competitive rather than shared and congenial. Newspapers are judgmental and snide.

The country is full of people at war with themselves, their minds and their bodies. ‘Must do better’ is the mantra of the moment. No one has a kind eye toward weakness.

To live like this is to live without generosity, both toward yourself and the suffering of others. It’s a selfish act of oneupmanship.

So I propose a day of public drunkenness. As a sign of surrender to fate, an acceptance of mortality and the limits of human wisdom. An orgy of drink and song, sex and vomiting. Dublin city-centre awash with the chaos of porter — and fancy gin for the women. The River Liffey to be used as a vomitorium. A few years of that, and it’d be hopping with fish.

Every town and field in the country to be a forum for outrageous sentimentality. For love and violence, for excessiveness of every kind.

People could sleep with whomever they want, whenever they want and have as many different partners that they want. Babies conceived on this day would be special citizens of the State, and upon reaching their 18th birthday, would automatically become TDs.

Imagine the democracy of seeing Leo hammered on Grafton Street with his arms around the homeless, singing, “I’m too sexy for Japan… tooooo sexy for Japan”. Wouldn’t it right things? Wouldn’t it be like a reset button, pressed to correct any notions of superiority and grandeur that might develop in the minds of the powerful? We could invite the Pope back and see himself and Sile Seoige falling sideways, waltzing cheek-to-cheek in an alleyway in the Liberties. Nuns drunk with farmers; millionaires and the long-term unemployed passing cans around a burning barrel. No one at work, no one burdened. We would drink ourselves beyond identity; you’d go to the far side of who you’ve become in society’s eyes, and rest awhile in shared humanity.

And the memories and stories that would emerge from such magnificence would entertain and sustain us until the next God-given celebration day began. It’d be hard to know how many of these we could handle in a year, though. Best for the moment to have a maximum of two, and to keep them well apart. And even though Jesus did turn himself into a flask of wine, I think that Corpus Christi in June would be too soon. We could ask the Jews for a loan of the Day of Atonement, which is in the autumn, and have it then. We could rename it the Day of At One Ment.

(All drink would be free, by the way. I think it’s important to say that, just in case publicans start to think that they can make a few bob out of it. There’d be no one behind the bar — you want it, you pull it yourself.)

And remember I praise not individual inebriation, a lonely activity full of misery and despair. No. I lust after a collective session. An extreme one. The tribal lash.

This Paddy’s Day will see many teenagers drinking and falling and crying and puking. They are a scandal to us, not to themselves. Perhaps they’re trying to tell us something. Perhaps we should join in.