David is a drug dealer in a prosperous country town. In other words, he manages one of its busiest pubs and calls himself, in his darkest moments, a "legalised drug dealer". He's young and bright and forthright, but because he only runs the place and needs the job, he doesn't want me to use his real name.
"I cannot afford the attention I might draw upon myself if I were to speak publicly" about under-age drinking, he says. What he sees and knows is seen and known by pretty well everyone with eyes in their heads. But what everyone knows and what everyone is willing to acknowledge is not at all the same thing.
When he contacted me after Micheal Martin launched his blitz on under-age drinking, David wanted to be clear that he was not trying to deny that publicans have responsibilities.
The law, he says, is unambiguous: "It is the absolute legal duty of the publican to prevent the sale of alcoholic beverages to people under the age of 18 on his or her premises. Obviously, the same legal duty applies to the consumption of alcohol upon those same premises by people who are under-age. After 7 p.m. an under-age person is not allowed on the premises without the accompaniment of a legal guardian."
He has no problem with these laws and does his best to comply with them. All he wants to know is whether other people have responsibilities as well. Parents, for example.
He wants to ask parents a simple question: "You send your under-age child out with his or her friends of a weekend night. You don't expect them home until 2 a.m. or 4 a.m. (or whenever it is they can sneak in, confident that you yourself are probably safely lost in a drink induced coma). You sent them out knowing that they had in their pockets the equivalent of the average industrial take-home wage (and whether they earned it or you gave it to them is irrelevant). Essentially my question is this: where do you think they are going? What, in the name of God, do you think they are going to do?"
The question is prompted in part by a conversation he had recently with the local garda, Dan. Recently, Dan, a conscientious and diligent public servant, came to David with a problem. A local mother had approached him with a complaint about David.
"My daughter is 17 and she has fake ID. She regularly goes to [name of local nightclub] but she decided to have a drink first in [the pub that David manages], and she tells me he's a very nice fella. And I have absolutely no problem with her drinking the odd pint, Dan, or vodka and Red Bull or whatever it is she drinks, but my little girl came home the other night in a cruel state, and [David] had served her. God Almighty, she could have been raped or anything. That man should be held responsible for serving her drink, because she is only 17, after all."
Even for Dan, a stickler for the law, this was a bit of a puzzle. The law had clearly been broken. The girl was 17 and she had been served alcohol in David's pub. But her mother knew that she had a false ID and must have known what it was for. The person who was reporting the crime had colluded in its commission. The law itself was being used, not to reinforce parental responsibility, but to substitute for it.
THIS is what David gets all the time. The mentality reminds him of his own parents when he was 17 or 18 and stopped going to Mass.
"With most of the functioning parts of their brains they knew for a fact that I wasn't going to Mass on Sundays, but as long as I made the effort to crawl out of the cot and dress respectably and vanish for an hour and a half on a Sunday morning, they didn't raise the subject. (Not even in the traditional rural `catch out the pagan' ritual of asking, `who said Mass?' or even more unequivocally, `who's dead?') In the same sense, I believe that parents half-know exactly where their offspring are going, and exactly what those children are doing with their astronomical amounts of spending money. It's just themselves that they are trying to fool, and they seem to enjoy a remarkable degree of success in that regard."
It's not just under-age drinking, of course. This kind of hazy half-knowledge envelops so many of our attitudes that it has become a kind of national pathology. Things are known but not acknowledged. Our abortion rate may be up there with the rest of Europe, but so long as abortion happens out of sight and is not acknowledged in our laws, it does not exist.
Everyone around him could see that Charles Haughey was on the take but no one knew. Everyone knew that the planning process in Dublin had been corrupted but the knowledge remained inert. Many people in the church knew that there was institutionalised child abuse, but most put that knowledge out of their minds.
As it is in the big world of politics, so it is in the small world of middle-aged parents and their teenage offspring. Lacking the confidence to enforce rules that they themselves no longer trust, parents often find it easier not to know. Thus do we educate our children in the two main principles of our public morality: don't ask, don't tell.
fotoole@irish-times.ie