‘Horrific injuries’ being caused to young people due to drink, says Cork doctor

“Every week we see young people with horrific injuries as a result of hazardous drinking. I’ve seen some horrible instances in the last year.”

That is the warning from Dr Eoin Fogarty, who is at the frontline in dealing with young people being treated at Cork University Hospital after alcohol abuse.

His comments come as it has been revealed a third of all attendances at CUH’s emergency department on weekend nights are due to alcohol.

Dr Fogarty said “hazardous” drinking by teenagers is now being “normalised”.

Alcohol Action Ireland (AAI) has published a report on youth drinking, which shows a 3% increase in alcohol consumption levels by 15- to 24-year-olds between 2024 and 2025.

The report highlights that when drinking is initiated by young people, it is accompanied by high levels of particularly risky and hazardous consumption, with 64% regularly binge drinking and one in three having an alcohol-use disorder. 

Dr Fogarty, consultant in emergency and retrieval medicine at CUH and an AAI board member, told The Echo: “This is a long- standing issue; 30% of our attendance on weekend nights is alcohol-related, and 6% overall.

Horrific injuries 

“Locally, every week we see young people with horrific injuries as a result of hazardous drinking. I’ve seen some horrible instances in the last year,” said Dr Fogarty.

“Young people have their whole lives ahead of them, but we see them suffer life-altering events where they have sustained serious injuries needing long-term care, potentially ending up in nursing homes.”

Dr Fogarty said providing hospital care for people injured due to alcohol-related incidents is costly to the State.

“It’s also a tragedy for family and loved ones when someone goes on a night out and because of some silly decisions, they and their families end up having to deal with it for the rest of their lives,” he said.

Dr Fogarty said that legislators should look into how alcohol can be advertised to young people.

“There’s no difference in the branding for zero-alcohol drinks. The way alcohol is advertised in Ireland needs to be very seriously addressed to tackle these horrible injuries.”

Blackout drunk

Jack, a 22-year-old living in Cork, who has been in recovery from alcohol for over three years, told The Echo: “Getting super drunk as a teenager in Ireland is so normal.

“When I was young it was totally normal to go down into a field at 14 or 15 years of age with a shoulder of vodka, drink it straight, and get absolutely polluted.

“If you were going out, it wasn’t to have one or two bottles of Corona and sit by the fire, it was to get blackout drunk; that was all we knew,” he said.

“When I started to get older and going out to pubs, I knew no different. People go out to pubs and sit around at a table with their friends and drink two or three pints and go home. But when I went to a pub, it was how drunk can I get, how quick can I do it, and how cheap can I do it? So you buy the spirits and you buy the shots and you get blacked out.

“It probably did contribute to me having a problem when I was older because no matter how drunk you got, no one would pass a rude comment. No one would criticise how much you were drinking because everyone was doing it.”