Say you are the minister for lawlessness and disorder and the country is finally being run by those giant shape-shifting lizards that Jim Corr's been warning us about. You have special responsibility for creating more drunken mayhem on the streets late at night. How do you go about achieving your goal?

Make alcohol cheap and relax the closing times of pubs so that people can drink as much as they want and go home whenever they wish? No, that wouldn't do it. The effects would initially be spectacular, but shortlived. Because after the inevitable burst of alcoholic gluttony, people would start to get the subversive idea that social drinking could actually be a pleasure, not just a race against the clock.

You'd have nobody lining up a half-dozen shorts at closing time, because there wouldn't be any closing time. You'd have people finishing their night out and going home at 10pm rather than feeling obliged to stay until last call with everybody else. You'd have orderly business in the late take-aways, with a regular flow of customers throughout the night.

You'd have steady custom for the taxi drivers all evening rather than a glut of drunks gathering to duel for one lone cab in the 4am rain. You might even see the country develop a less psychotic and healthier relationship with alcohol in the medium to long term.

No, that wouldn't serve your ends at all. Instead, as minister with special responsibility for drunken mayhem at the Department of Lawlessness and Disorder, here is what you'd do. You'd impose extra restrictions on the sale and availability of drink to consenting adults, thus increasing its desirability and cachet.

So, for example, you'd stop supermarkets treating drink like any other commodity and insist, instead, that they keep it in secure isolation in a special unit festooned with garlic bulbs, crucifixes and gothic incantations.

Naturally, this form of extraordinary rendition would impose additional staffing demands on retailers, making alcohol more expensive. This, in turn, would ensure that punters packed in the pesky practice of drinking cheaply and safely in their homes and started returning to the pubs, preferably by car.

Once you've got them back in the pubs and clubs, because it's no more expensive than drinking at home, how do you go on to maximise alcohol intake and resulting bedlam on the streets? This is the clever bit. You set a deadline on a night's drinking, but you've got to choose that time limit carefully. It's got to be late enough to facilitate some serious drinking, but still early enough so even a casual reveller will feel like a real killjoy if he doesn't stay the distance. Not too early, not too late - around 2.30am would be just perfect.

So you insist that every single nightclub and late-night venue in the country close at that time and police it strictly with stiff penalties and punishments for noncompliant premises. No more special dispensations or “theatre” licences - everybody has to be ejected from every drinking den by 2.30am.

This is quite important to ensure that the maximum drunken mayhem really kicks in. By 3am the streets will be teeming with tired, tetchy, intoxicated punters, bristling with alcohol-fuelled hostility and ready to swing a fist or a blade at the first person to jump the kebab queue or pass a smart comment.

Add a sudden surge of demand for taxis, stir up the narky cabbies who've been idling around for hours, top it off with some raw wintry weather and stand well back.

Sadly, this isn't just a fanciful dystopian recipe for drunken, late-night pandemonium. The above, in a nutshell, are the provisions of the 2008 Intoxicating Liquor Bill, announced by the minister for justice last week. The aim of the legislation, apparently, is to solve public-order issues and binge drinking, but you've got to wonder what colour is the sky in the Ireland inhabited by the person who thinks these measures will do the trick.

Up to now, late-night venues have been free to apply the wryly felicitous policy of “staggered” closing times. Premises in bustling areas such as Dublin's Temple Bar have been co-operating for years on sequential closing and this policy has, according to bar owners, been effective in minimising the risk of trouble at flashpoints such as fast-food outlets and taxi ranks.

With customers leaving at regular intervals between 12.30am and 4am, the Nitelink buses and taxis are able to handle demand and the crowds are dwindling as the night goes on. Because there's no vast flood of people coming onto the streets at one particular time, the gardai have a better chance of responding rapidly to any trouble that might break out.

Under the new bill, though, all of that is about to change. Although many licencees have voiced their objections to the new measures on public-order grounds, I reckon you can see the fingerprints of the powerful vintners' lobby all over this bill.

I suspect you'll find, in the course of the next year or two, that the amount of alcohol sold to late-night revellers hasn't reduced at all. They'll just be cramming that lost hour's worth of drink into the last 20 minutes or so, with less man-hours required to serve it up.

There will be at least as many, if not many more, brawls and stabbings and drunken rows on the streets. They'll just kick off that bit earlier. Drunken trouble-seekers will be the least affected by these new provisions. Tourists, clubbers and civilised people who don't need the state to decide their bedtime will, however, be genuinely irked and inconvenienced by these ludicrous restrictions.

For a country whose Unique Selling Point is a reputation for knowing how to party, we're having an increasingly tough time attracting sophisticated visitors and grown-up entertainment, an events organiser told me last week. The cult of the “superstar DJ” has pretty much passed us by, for example, because the stars who draw crowds to other European capitals' night spots are only warming up at 2.30am.

We don't have late-night cafe bars - the vintners also saw to that - so unless your idea of entertainment is watching the clock while you drink yourself into an emetic stupor on overpriced paint stripper in the deafening din of some packed club, your range of options for a late night in this country are pitifully limited.

But what if opening hours were extended instead of tightened? What if a variety of venues were licenced to trade until 6am, serving food, coffee, wine, playing music, offering live acts, jazz, blues, trad, comedy, right through the night?

Do the minister for justice and his consultants and all the bright sparks on the Alcohol Advisory Committee - credited by the department with recommending these new measures - honestly believe that, given those options and liberties, we'd all stay up drinking and fighting and shouting at one another in sweaty, noisy nightclubs until six on the dot?

In short, if we were treated like responsible, intelligent adults, instead of corralled and restrained like slobbering pissheads, is there a real fear we won't live down to expectations?

brenda.power@sunday-times.ie

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