Government avoided call for off-licence fee increase

The Minister for Health James Reilly has revealed that Cabinet has postponed a decision on his request to increase the licence fee paid by off-licences as a means of tackling alcohol misuse when fellow Ministers decided to take no action by this means “as yet”.
21 March 2013
The National Off-Licence Association responded that such a move would be unfair as small retailers were paying the same €1,500 licence fee as the multiples.
Dr Reilly, a supporter of Minimum Unit Pricing on an All-Ireland basis, had been speaking at the National Healthcare Conference which ran alongside the National Alcohol Awareness Week’s Alcohol Forum in Dublin and had stated, “I would prefer to see prices come down in the pub and go up in the off-licence”.
On Day One of the Forum, the Chairman Pat Harvey had demanded that a levy be put on the drinks industry. The former Chief Executive of the North Western Health Board was addressing the National Alcohol Forum when he called for the “unapologetic” levy on the drinks industry “Goliath”.
He didn’t “buy” the argument that drinking levels are solely an individual’s responsibility.
“The drinks industry is a ‘Goliath’ in terms of muscle and funds nurturing a society that has alcohol consumption at dangerous and harmful levels,” he claimed.
The industry should be levied so that it “pays generously towards undoing some of the harm associated with harmful drinking”.
The National Alcohol Conference is taking place in the Convention Centre Dublin and is the Forum’s flagship event as part of National Alcohol Awareness Week.
The Junior Health Minister Alex White, responsible for the alcohol strategy begun by previous Junior Minister Roisin Shortall, spoke on the second day of the conference and publicly conceded that there would be opposition to some of the measures, contained in the new Bill, due “shortly”.
He stressed that the Government was “not going to wait” to see how measures to tackle alcohol abuse worked in other countries. This country would take a lead, he said, despite such measures as MUP being dropped from the UK Government’s agenda for tackling alcohol misuse.
He’d heard arguments against “every single measure” being proposed including arguments that sports sponsorship does not increase consumption and promised “actual decisions” on pricing and sponsorship shortly.?
“We won’t be deferring our decision, we’re not commissioning more research or see how other countries get along,” he stated.?The action plan is based on the Alcohol Advisory Group, a Government expert group, which sat for three years before publishing its report last year.

“We won’t be deferring our decision, we’re not commissioning more research or see how other countries get along” – Alex White.
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