Alcohol marketing, including advertising, sponsorship and other forms of promotion, increases the likelihood that adolescents will start to use alcohol, and to drink more if they are already using alcohol. Young people’s drinking patterns have a direct effect on their health, development and welfare. Therefore reducing children’s exposure to alcohol marketing is a child protection issue.

Yet every day, in numerous ways and through numerous media, children and young people in Ireland are continuously exposed to positive, risk-free images of alcohol and its use. Due to a lack of effective regulations, young people are poorly protected from these sophisticated and powerful influences on their drinking behaviour and expectations.

They are bombarded with positive images of alcohol through marketing of brands and products – in effect, the alcohol industry has become a child’s primary educator on alcohol. Marketing can shape youth culture by creating and sustaining expectations and norms about how to achieve social, sporting or sexual success, how to celebrate, how to relax and how to belong. The failure to protect children from exposure to alcohol marketing is associated with earlier and increased alcohol consumption.

The Public Health (Alcohol) Bill contains a number of important regulations that will reduce children’s exposure to alcohol marketing and move us away from many of the existing systems of industry self-regulation and voluntary codes, which have proved completely ineffective and are without meaningful sanction......