Alcohol Action Ireland press release, Tuesday October 14 2025
Alcohol Action Ireland (AAI), the national independent advocate to reduce alcohol harm, welcomes today’s launch of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) handbook on cancer prevention. The handbook marks the first time the WHO’s cancer research agency, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), has evaluated the prevention of alcohol-related cancers, evaluated the impact of reducing or quitting alcohol consumption on cancer risk, and focused on alcohol policies to reduce consumption.
Alcohol causes at least 7 types of cancer, and in 2020 there were approximately 1,000 alcohol related cancer cases in Ireland. It is one of the few risk factors that is entirely preventable, yet the policies that could reduce this burden remain underused. The report establishes with no further doubt that population-wide alcohol policies reduce drinking, and that reduced drinking lowers cancer risk.
AAI CEO Dr Sheila Gilheany said: “This report calls for coordinated alcohol policies to reduce population-level consumption as a means to reduce Ireland’s cancer burden. These include increasing excise duties and Minimum Unit Prices and of course the introduction of health information labelling, which has been back in the news recently with questions over how the alcohol industry managed to convince government to U-turn on its own policy.
“Ireland has been leading the way internationally with solid policies from the Department of Health with its legislative approach – the Public Health (Alcohol) Act (PHAA), which is based on WHO’s ‘Best Buys’ policy recommendations and includes measures such Minimum Unit Pricing for alcohol, modest controls on alcohol advertising, and labelling of alcohol products with health information.
“However, as we have seen with the labelling fiasco, the ease of access the alcohol industry has to government figures has created a space within government where alcohol industry misinformation has been allowed to flourish. In turn this is leading to a row-back on proven policies. For example, excise duties have not increased in 12 years and the level of Minimum Unit Pricing for alcohol has not been changed since its introduction in 2022, at a level first proposed a decade earlier – the public health benefits of which are being eroded by inflation.
“The WHO also calls for policies that reduce alcohol outlet density, or days or hours of sale, as a way to reduce cancer risk. In Ireland we have the spectre of the exact opposite being introduced via the Sale of Alcohol Bill amid continuous calls from vested interests for longer opening hours and increased venues for alcohol sales.
“There are also calls for strong regulation of alcohol marketing, and despite Ireland’s PHAA being passed way back in 2018, the section relating to control of content of advertising has yet to be commenced while other controls are being egregiously flouted by zero-alcohol advertising. Unfortunately, none of this is surprising given that there is no dedicated national strategy to tackle alcohol harms.”
Alcohol policy is currently spread across a number of government departments including Health, Justice, Finance, Education, Media, Tourism, Enterprise and Agriculture, often with contradictory and incompatible aims. For example, the PHAA, which comes from the Department of Health, aims to reduce population-level alcohol consumption, while the proposed Sale of Alcohol Bill from the Department of Justice looks to increase availability. A strategic goal of AAI is the establishment of an Office for Alcohol Harm Reduction which would drive coherent government policy development on alcohol and would particularly seek to coordinate across government departments.
Dr Gilheany continued: “Ireland has previously developed successful strategies to reduce cancer risk from smoking. There is much from those strategies that can be applied to addressing the harms from alcohol, such as the establishment of the Office for Tobacco Control which, according to Micheál Martin, ‘gave us capacity to deal with the issue’. An Office for Alcohol Harm Reduction is surely just common sense and as to why Ireland hasn’t yet taken such an approach is maybe not such a mystery – it certainly serves vested interests to have a multitude of government bodies with no clear oversight of the issues around alcohol harm.
“The tragic fact is that the WHO report points to government’s disjointed alcohol policies as adding unnecessarily to Ireland’s cancer burden, with all its human and financial cost. There is an urgent need for the establishment of an Office for Alcohol Harm Reduction, which would be a game changer in recalibrating Ireland’s relationship with alcohol and which would go a long way to help reduce Ireland’s cancer burden. Ireland has shown significant public health leadership over the years. It is critical now that the government does not allow the alcohol industry to set this back in relation to Ireland’s cheapest, most harmful and most widely available drug.”
ENDS
NOTES: IARC handbook is available here
