The opening lines of their 2024 hit album “The Tortured Poets Department” read: Taylor Swift wastes no time describing her state of mind: she’s in love, it’s ruining her life, she wants to kill everyone, she was “a functioning alcoholic” to boot. Swift is no stranger to dramatic projections, singing casually about driving off cliffs or jumping off buildings. But this wine-soaked overture shocks her captive audience perhaps more than her murderous tendencies. For years, alcohol consumption in the West has been declining, largely due to youth.

Recent data from the Drinks Industry Group of Ireland found that alcohol consumption in the Republic is at its lowest level in more than 35 years. Despite its long-standing (and hard to shake) reputation, Ireland is now around the European average in terms of per capita consumption in litres. This is not a new finding, but rather a repeat of continental trends. In 2019, for example, data from Drink Aware found that a quarter of Britain’s Generation Z were abstinent. Given their parents’ attitudes, this is a pretty frightening figure – consumption peaked in 2004 and has been declining since then. In 2022, the National Drugs Library claimed that (in Ireland) “the number of abstinent young people has increased from 17 per cent in 2006-2007 to 28 per cent in 2019-2021.”

We can rattle off some obvious explanations. Excessive alcohol consumption is bad for us, and we know this more than ever. Public health messaging—an industry that isn’t particularly interested in grasping nuance by nature—has gone to great lengths to convey all the worst aspects (physical safety in the immediate sense, long-term health issues in the broader sense). In 2023, Ireland passed a regulation requiring alcoholic beverages to have cancer warnings on their labels by 2026, suggesting a radical shift in attitudes. The country has also introduced even stricter conditions when it comes to alcohol advertising.

Superficial improvements in public health are all well and good. And the following argument comes with the usual caveats: Ireland would do well to change its national attitude to alcohol; unbridled and unrestrained marketing of spirits, beer and wine would be a blot on the public; despite the cultural dominance of Catholicism, a dose of Protestant restraint can do no harm; the Mediterranean does a lot right when it comes to its relationship with wine (higher frequency, lower standards, binge drinking is a foreign concept to many).

We should, however, be skeptical of any apparent radical changes in national behavior, whether positive or negative. There is reason to believe that this decline in consumption is due to something disturbing. It seems as if one social vice has simply been replaced by another; as if youthful fear of the physical effects of alcohol is masking an unhappy state of mind that we have not previously anticipated.

We should remember the Covid lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. Young people – many of whom make up that large group of young teetotalers – were not only cut off from their friends and education. They were also confronted with a barrage of condescending health messages: Stay home! Keep your distance! Wear a mask! No matter how useful (or not) this barrage of messages was at the time, promoting restraint from risk at all costs, was likely to have an impact on young and developing minds.

At a time when teenagers should be testing boundaries and developing identities, circumstances have cast the outside world as something to be feared. It will take decades to understand all the long-term side effects of the lockdowns designed to counter the immediate virus threat—whether on children’s cognitive development, the economy, or the strength of the social contract. But for now, it seems reasonable to assume that we have raised—in part—an overcautious generation that has been forced to cede its personal ability to manage risk to the government. It’s no wonder that a glass of wine seems a daunting prospect for people with such pampered sensibilities.

( “It’s everywhere. Cocaine is a drug that affects every age group, every gender and every area.”Opens in new window. )

Meanwhile, there is a larger existential concern – less speculative than the social impact of lockdowns on young minds. Dr Jean Twenge – psychology professor and author – correlates the decline in alcohol consumption with the advent of the smartphone. Now this puritanical generation can talk to each other from the comfort of their own bedrooms and maintain some semblance of community. The social function of the pub has ebbed, replaced by the small screen and a range of dopamine-reducing apps. But of course the smartphone is no panacea: it is a red herring for real socialisation and brings with it a range of damaging effects on the malleable brains of young people.

( Social media is 20 years old. How can we still get so much wrong?Opens in new window. )

So young people are drinking less, which is good in a narrow and immediate sense. But life happens outside of health messages and the hegemony of social media. Communicable vices are very real and we may have replaced the complicated convention of drinking with something worse.