The USI Perspective (Based on an interview with a senior office holder

with considerable student welfare experience)

  USI represents more than 250,000 students nationally. Its then Welfare

Officer was a member of the working group which drafted the national

framework document in 2001, and since then USI has been involved in its

own  health promotional campaigns in relation to alcohol and other

student lifestyle matters.  

  This USI officer readily acknowledged that risky drinking by students

contributes to a range of personal problems, including poor academic

performance or college non completion, sexual risk taking, involvement

in or exposure to violent assaults, and financial difficulties. He pointed

out, however, that such difficulties are neither unique  to  students nor to

young people  but are broadly reflective of a wider cultural failure to

integrate  alcohol safely into Irish society.  He further argued that

excessive drinking during undergraduate years   which he saw as

influenced both by the freedom associated with transition to college and

the academic pressures of the higher educational system   does not

persist, in most instances, once young people assume work and other

adult responsibilities. 

  He described how USI, in planning its own alcohol awareness campaign

in 2003 had contacts both with the Health Promotion Unit (HPU) of the

Department of Health & Children and with MEAS, the social aspects

organisation of the Irish drinks industry.  Its decision to collaborate with

MEAS was based pragmatically upon the fact that MEAS was willing to

give financial support without dictating the content of the awareness

messages in this  Respect Alcohol Respect Yourself  campaign. This USI

officer expressed a belief that alcohol awareness should contain a

balance between identification of the problems associated with alcohol

and its social benefits. 

  While supportive of the overall aims of college alcohol policies, he

expressed two major reservations about the way in which they have been

evolving: the first is that these policies have led to the withdrawal of

drinks industry sponsorship of student societies without setting in place

alternative sponsorship or providing additional finance from the colleges'

capitation fees; the second is that policies which curb drinking on campus

may not reduce harm, if they have the unintended consequence of

creating off campus drinking events which are independent of student

unions, less well monitored and somewhat more risky. 

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