Is Rosie O’Donnell right that “nobody drinks more” than the Irish?

The Irish American comedian moved to Dublin with her teenager after Donald Trump won the 2020 US Presidential Election. 

Although she often visited Ireland as a child, Ms O’Donnell said moving permanently still meant something of a culture shock. 

When asked what she had a learnt about the Irish on a recent appearance on  Late Night with Seth Meyers, Ms O’Donnell said that “nobody drinks more”. 

“When I was a young comic a lot of comedians did jokes about that and I thought this is really unfair,” she said. 

“This is stereotyping - and then I moved there; I went to the doctor and there's a questionnaire for new patients. 

“It said, ‘How many drinks do you have in a week?’ The first box you can check said, ‘One to 15’.

“I've been there now for 18 months and I gotta tell you 15 a week isn't that hard to do in Ireland.”

On The Hard Shoulder, cookbook author Aoife Carrigy described the interview as a “bit of a windup”. 

“You would hope that someone who spent 18 months here as she has or says she has would have had a more nuanced kind of take on it,” she said. 

“But in thinking about it, I suppose it depends on your experience. 

“If you were judging it on going into pubs in the last month of sunshine, seeing everybody crowded outside the pubs and so on, the enthusiasm that we bring to drinking culture seems like a very different one to what she's used to in the US.”

Pints outside a County Clare pub. Picture by: Paul Quayle/Alamy

Ms Carrigy noted that average alcohol consumption in Ireland has dropped by a third since 2001 and the number of teetotalers is higher than ever. 

“One third of all adults would abstain in a year,” she said. 

“So, a third of us don't drink and that actually brings it up our consumption up to just over 14 liters per person.

“But that is the European average.”

Ms Carrigy added that Ms O’Donnell’s remarks also do not reflect how alcohol remains an instinct part of how Irish people socialise with each other. 

“It is evolving and I think that's what was maybe disappointing about Rosie O'Donnell's kind of sweeping statements is that she missed a lot of that nuance,” she said. 

“That actually it's not about the boozing, it's about the the sociability and the boozing is part of how we celebrate fun things in our lives.”

Main image: Rosie O'Donnell. Picture by: Charles Guerin/ABACAPRESS.COM