Cultural/Ethnic Viewpoint of Alcoholism Among the Irish

The stereotype of hard-drinking Irishmen is something of a commonplace of Anglo-American culture. But stereotypes may derive as much from kernels of truth as attribution, and the association in popular imagination of Irish culture and the culture of alcohol has been located not only in ethnic consciousness but also in history. Included in a popular history of Ireland is an account of the economic stranglehold that England exercised over Ireland in the 17th century, when direct trade between Ireland and the American colonies was restricted to exports of horses, servants, and "victuals" and to imports of all goods from the colonies except:

sugar, tobacco, indigo, cotton, wool, molasses, ginger, pitch, turpentine, tar, rice, and nine or ten other specified items--which, stripped of [the law's] facetious verbiage, just means that [Ireland] was permitted to import West Indian rum--thus aiding the planters and rum makers of the West Indies, at the expense of Irish farmers, distillers, and constitutions.

The foregoing will seem to many readers a good English joke. But from constant reiteration through the centuries these English jokes proved rather wearing on Ireland's health (MacManus 485).

MacManus develops the argument that England's documented and exploitative economic policies are at least par

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cohol use and abuse among the Irish, including among subpopulations that are known to be at risk for using alcohol. In this regard, Nugent, Lester, et al. (passim), describe a study of first-time mothers in Ireland in which more than 10% revealed themselves to be heavy drinkers. About 25% were nondrinkers, and the rest were found to be moderate drinkers. These were self-reports, since the mothers were interviewed to elicit information about their drinking and smoking habits. The researchers followed the mothers through the last three months of pregnancy and the first few days of their infants' life. On the third day of infant life, the researchers measured the newborns' crying for pitch, tone, and modulation. They found that the newborns whose mothers had consumed the most alcohol had crying patterns that suggested defective use of the voice and pitch. The conclusion (Nugent, et al. 1813f) was that maternal alcohol use may adversely affect the quality of children's voice and respiration patterns. In other words, the physical effects of maternal use of alcohol were observable in the mothers' children. A 1996 study of alcohol, tobacco, and controlled substances among adolescents in the United Kingdom, which included a sample from No
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2860
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)