{"id":271708,"date":"2026-01-30T09:59:10","date_gmt":"2026-01-30T09:59:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/271708\/"},"modified":"2026-01-30T09:59:10","modified_gmt":"2026-01-30T09:59:10","slug":"horrific-injuries-being-caused-to-young-people-due-to-drink-says-cork-doctor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/271708\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Horrific injuries\u2019 being caused to young people due to drink, says Cork doctor"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cEvery week we see young people with horrific injuries as a result of hazardous drinking. I\u2019ve seen some horrible instances in the last year.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

His comments come as it has been revealed a third of all attendances at CUH\u2019s emergency department on weekend nights are due to alcohol.<\/p>\n

Dr Fogarty said \u201chazardous\u201d drinking by teenagers is now being \u201cnormalised\u201d.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Dr Fogarty, consultant in emergency and retrieval medicine at CUH and an AAI board member, told The Echo: \u201cThis is a long- standing issue; 30% of our attendance on weekend nights is alcohol-related, and 6% overall.<\/p>\n

Horrific injuries\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cLocally, every week we see young people with horrific injuries as a result of hazardous drinking. I\u2019ve seen some horrible instances in the last year,\u201d said Dr Fogarty.<\/p>\n

\n \u201cYoung 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.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

Dr Fogarty said providing hospital care for people injured due to alcohol-related incidents is costly to the State.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s 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,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Dr Fogarty said that legislators should look into how alcohol can be advertised to young people.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Blackout drunk<\/p>\n

Jack, a 22-year-old living in Cork, who has been in recovery from alcohol for over three years, told The Echo: \u201cGetting super drunk as a teenager in Ireland is so normal.<\/p>\n

\n \u201cWhen 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.\n <\/p>\n

\u201cIf you were going out, it wasn\u2019t to have one or two bottles of Corona and sit by the fire, it was to get blackout drunk; that was all we knew,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cEvery week we see young people with horrific injuries as a result of hazardous drinking. I\u2019ve seen some…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":271709,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[129137,15607,79,103,61,60],"class_list":["post-271708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-cuh","tag-cork-health","tag-cork-news","tag-health","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=271708"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271708\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/271709"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=271708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=271708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=271708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}