GUEST COLUMN: New alcohol-advertising rules welcome, but they don’t go far enough

The broadcast watershed ban on television and radio alcohol advertising came into force on Friday, January 10.
The watershed – Section 19 of the Public Health (Alcohol) Act 2018 (PHA Act) – will ensure a daytime broadcasting ban on alcohol advertising, with no advertisements for alcohol products on television from 3am to 9pm and on radio on a weekday from 3pm to 10am the following morning.
This measure is designed to reduce the level of exposure of children to alcohol marketing, which is known to be a key driver of both initiating alcohol use by children and increasing use. It is a particularly important restriction given that Diageo is currently the Number 4 advertiser to children in Ireland and at least 50,000 children start to drink every year.
Ireland is rightly praised internationally for its leadership in passing the act, which is a suite of quite modest measures designed to provide some degree of protection from the tactics of an aggressive industry acting against the population’s health through relentless marketing. Alcohol Action Ireland (AAI) and many others have strongly campaigned for years for its introduction, and since it was passed, alcohol consumption per capita has dropped by 10 percent, which is positive.
However, the fact that the broadcast watershed is only coming into force now, almost seven years after being signed into law, and that not all sections of the PHA Act are in force yet, shows the power of the alcohol industry’s lobbying efforts to stymie and delay progress. The different sections of the act are designed to complement one another, and the legislation’s public-health benefits will only be fully realised when all the sections are enforced. With Ireland drinking at a level 40 percent higher than HSE lower-risk guidelines, this is an imperative.
The two further sections of the PHA Act in relation to advertising that remain to be commenced are Section 13, which places restrictions on the content of alcohol advertisements, and Section 18, which relates to advertisements in publications.
Section 13, in particular, is ferociously resisted by industry, as it restricts the content of alcohol advertisements to facts, stripping out the industry myths which are used to recklessly promote alcohol consumption. In addition, ads for alcohol products will be required to include health information, such as cancer warnings and details of the HSE alcohol information website, with the aim of providing unbiased material about alcohol risks and to break the positive associations between alcohol and lifestyle. 
Drafting of Section 13 began in June 2022, and in October 2024 Health Minister Stephen Donnelly claimed his priority was to finalise the regulations on the content of alcohol advertisements under Section 13, and yet there is still no sign of it being commenced. Even if commenced today, it will take three years before the section is enforced, so that would be a ten-year delay on legislation that was signed into law in 2018.
The bizarre thing is that Section 13 is designed to work in tandem with health warning labelling regulations, which come into force in May 2026, so why is there such a delay in its commencement? If the next government is serious about tackling alcohol harm, which kills more than 1,500 people every year and costs the state €12 billion annually, then it needs to stop dragging its heels and fully implement all sections of the PHA Act.
There is strong public support for controls on alcohol marketing and a need for more information on alcohol, with polling indicating over 70 percent are in favour of such measures. It’s more than time to stop this deference to industry and to implement this democratically mandated law.

Dr Sheila Gilheany is the CEO of Alcohol Action Ireland.