Lose The Booze

I did mean to write something on this, swear just time is not my friend today. Suffice to say I’ve been sober through Jay-Z on Thursday, Morrissey on Saturday, meeting the bloggerettes yesterday and the Euro 2008 final and will be til Midnight on Wednesday…

Meant to write something but instead here’s the press release RTE sent out instead…

LOSE THE BOOZE – THE RICK O’SHEA SHOW CHALLENGE ON RTÉ 2FM:

 

Can listeners, to his RTÉ 2fm afternoon show (weekdays 2 – 5pm), give up alcohol for one full week…and survive! Starting today (Thurs 26 June) Rick asked listeners to ‘try the dry’ ….hundreds said yes…but will they see it through!

 

It all began after Rick gave the stats…Irish people spend more, of their household budget, on alcohol than anybody else in any of the other 27 EU member states. Three and a half times more!  4.1% compared to 1.4% in the UK….1% for Germany and less than that again for Spain, Italy and Portugal.

 

Based on this Rick conducted a mini-survey asking listeners how much alcohol…if any… they’d consumed in the previous seven days.  The results were a bit scary!!!

 

One guy…28 year old Gareth… said he drank ‘about 60 pints…35 vodkas…and god knows how many shots’ and last weekend,  22 year old Brenda, claimed she drank ’24 bottles of corona, three bottles of white wine, two jaeger bombs, three shots of sambuca and one mickey finn’!!!

 

Listeners admitted they ‘probably’ drank too much…and said they definitely spent too much but blamed the booze based social scene.

 

It was then Rick set the challenge….could they Lose the Booze’ for one full week. He agreed to do it if enough listeners would join him…and they did! Including 25 year old Colm who spends, between beer and clubbing approximately 2000euro a month. He said he’s locking himself indoors to avoid temptation. 20 year old college student Helen reckons half her income goes on drink and she’d save a fortune…or at least be able to afford a new car exhaust…if she cut down.

 

The ‘Lose the Booze’ Challenge continues until midnight next Wednesday (2 July) on RTÉ 2fm

9 thoughts on “Lose The Booze

  1. I actually read through that EU Household Budget survey last week for work and came across that alcohol stat before reading this. The only problem with it is that every statistic in it is based on two permises: a) how costly the product is and b) how much we consume it, and you can never tell which of these factors weighs more in any given figure. Hence our 4.1% could be due to rip off prices or excessive intake. And as we all know the answer is both.

  2. my impression (from friends, newspaper articles etc) is that people in the UK drink 2-3 (or more) times as often and as many in one sitting, than we in canada. Many of my friends here have moved from the UK and have the same impresssion. i guess our drug of choice over here isnt booze but BC Bud (pot), or worse – ectasy and now meth

  3. In Ireland it is pretty hard to stay off the booze because of all the peer pressure, it’s one of the reasons I moved to Holland. Here you can drink cola all night and nobody care.
    For the guy below comparing the UK to Canada, I believe that Rick lives in the part of Ireland that left the UK in 1922 so maybe comparing Ireland to Canada would be more relevant.

  4. Lexi, Bngr does the economist speak so well… Makes it almost sexy. She’s the female David McWilliams 🙂

    And Aidan, a fair geographical point but I would have thought their consumption and ours to be pretty similar…

  5. Aidan is right. we canucks hate being compared to or called yanks. and Aiden, i’m not a bloke 🙂

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