Pre Budget Submission to Budget 2021 for the Minister of Finance
September 2020

AAI contribution to the current review of the Child Care Act in line with the commitment set out in Better Outcomes, Brighter Futures: The National Policy Framework on Children and Young People 2014–2020, to review and reform, as necessary, the Child Care Act 1991.
September 2020.

This research paper was carried out by UCC student Leslie Keating and explores and highlight the unique challenges that adult children of alcoholics (ACOAs) face in the context of mental health and wellbeing.

The project uses some of Alcohol Action Ireland’s short stories of lived experience submitted via the ‘Silent Voices’ website, as well as interviews with 7 adults who identify as Adult Children of Alcoholics.

It has been argued that the alcohol industry uses corporate social responsibility activities to influence policy and undermine public health, and that every opportunity should be taken to scrutinise such activities. This study analyses a controversial Diageo-funded ‘responsible drinking’ campaign (“Stop out of Control Drinking”, or SOOCD) in Ireland. The study aims to identify how the campaign and its advisory board members frame and define (i) alcohol-related harms, and their causes, and (ii) possible solutions.

This report is based on the 2015 European Schools Project for Alcohol and Other Drugs (ESPAD) Survey carried out in Ireland and is the sixth Irish data-collection wave of ESPAD. It is based on data from more than 1,400 Irish students surveyed in 2015. The most important goal of the ESPAD survey is to monitor trends in alcohol and other drug use among 15-16 year-olds and to compare trends between countries and groups of countries. It also provides the opportunity to observe the changes in these trends in Ireland over the six waves in the past 20 years.

The European School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs (ESPAD) is a collaborative effort of independent research teams in more than forty European countries and the largest cross-national research project on adolescent substance use in the world.

The overall aim with the project is to repeatedly collect comparable data on substance use among 15-16 year old students in as many European countries as possible.