Alcohol Action Ireland held their conference ‘Girls, Women and Alcohol: The changing nature of female alcohol consumption in Ireland’  on 21 April 2015. Katherine Brown, director of the Institute of Alcohol Studies in the UK described the changes in female alcohol consumption, from having a large role in the temperance movement, to the ‘ladette’ drinking culture in the 1990s, to the recent rise of ‘mummy’s wine time’, whereby wine is now a socially acceptable coping mechanism for women trying to balance work and home life.  She said we now live in an alcogenic environment, and outlined the role that marketing to women by the alcohol industry had played. Alcohol is marketed to women as glamorous, sophisticated, feminine, sexy, often placed alongside lipstick, handbags and shoes.

Lucy Rocca, author and founder of Soberistas.com spoke about her own experiences with alcohol. She described how she previously considered an alcoholic as someone who started drinking at 7am, not a normal woman like her with a ‘job and a nice house in the suburbs’. When she ended up in a hospital bed after a night’s drinking she decided to quit drinking and subsequently founded Soberistas.com, a non-religious, peer support online resource for women with alcohol dependency issues. Within a year more than 20,000 people had signed up to the site from, many from Ireland.

Ann Dowsett Johnston, alcohol policy advocate and author of Drink: The Intimate Relationship Between Women and Alcohol, said that women need to start thinking about their relationship with alcohol.  Women tend to use alcohol to self-medicate and tend to turn to alcohol rather than seek help for depression and anxiety. She stated three that alcohol is too cheap, too accessible and too heavily marketed.  Clíona Saidléar, Executive Director, Rape Crisis Network of Ireland highlighted the link between alcohol and sexual violence. She said there needed to be a refocus on the perpetrator of such violence and a move away from victim blaming.  She also spoke about the issue of consent and the difficulties in negotiating consent when alcohol is involved.