Electioneering in Co Clare 60 years ago, Eamon de Valera took a gang of supporters into Browne’s pub in Parteen after a hard day. He ordered a round of drinks, the bill amounting to one shilling and four old pence.

Nobody is sure who paid for the drinks, or if they were paid for at all. Indeed, opinion is bitterly divided on the matter. Some locals claim another customer stood Dev and his friends the round. But others maintain that the Chief and his entourage left the bill unpaid. Now a new book has added fuel to the flames by claiming that the publican made a note of the bad debt in the pub accounts at the time.

The only thing that can be said with certainty is that Dev didn’t put his hand in his pocket, and that’s the reason the story is still a tetchy topic for his supporters. Some accusations, it seems, are beyond the pale.

Film director Neil Jordan caught some flak when he produced a movie that hinted Dev might have had some prior knowledge of Michael Collins’s assassination. Jordan was forced to don a tin hat to deflect the criticism that followed. If he had dredged up Parteengate he might have been run out of town. Political ruthlessness is forgivable, but any suggestion that an Irishman has dodged his round borders on the treasonous.

As a nation we have an international reputation for extravagant drinking habits to maintain, and it is particularly incumbent upon us to parade our patriotism with added zeal around St Patrick’s Day.

Admired and envied across the globe for our booze-fuelled bonhomie, nobody wants to let the side down. Buying drink and being great craic is what we do best, and there is an obligation on us to do it with extra brio when our national saint’s day rolls around.

The drink culture is so ingrained that the timid proposal to close pubs and off-licences on March 17, in order to cut down on public drunkenness, was never likely to get off the ground. Just like the scandalous claim that Dev disappeared to the gents when it was his shout, suggesting restraint in honour of St Patrick counts as high treason.

Being Irish, as successive surveys remind us, is synonymous with fun, charm and excessive drink. The latest of these polls, involving a sample of 1,800 people across Ireland and Britain, found that our nationality is the one that most of our neighbours would like to claim. Some 80% said their favourite patron saint’s day was St Patrick’s with just 3% plumping for poor old St Dafydd (the Welsh version). If they could switch, about 50% of those surveyed said they would prefer to be Irish. Asked why, 70% said they envied us our gift of the gab, our friendly and fun-loving nature and our lilting accents.

That romantic vision of Irishness, of happy drinkers exchanging witticisms in a Hollywood brogue, is wonderfully lucrative when it comes to snaring tourists. But it’s a burden when we start believing it ourselves.

Having bought into this fanciful version of our national uniqueness, we persist in viewing public drunkenness as a charming, loveable trait. Tough sanctions have brought responsibility to the whole area of drink driving, but binge-drinking is tolerated far more than it ought to be.

It is barely a decade since an ability to down 10 pints and drive home was considered a boast. Now nobody would admit to drinking and driving, since having “just the one” is liable to earn you discomfiting glances at a social occasion. But it is still entirely acceptable, even essential, to admit to getting absolutely hammered every now and then.

It is not possible to have an Irish victory at Cheltenham, for instance, without hearing punters and commentators alike remarking on the numbers of sore heads about the place next morning. Nothing, from a small each-way victory on the tote to a child’s christening, is considered properly marked unless drink flows copiously. That story of the little girl who mentioned the name of a pub when asked where she made her First Communion isn’t just apocryphal.

What’s changed is that these events — the child’s big day, the joy of the win, the bank holiday weekend — used to be the focus of the celebration and drink was a necessary lubricant, along with good company and good conversation. Now it seems that getting drunk is the main objective, affirmation that you have had a good time.

A national health and lifestyle survey carried out a few years ago showed that alcohol consumption was growing in line with our economic achievements. Over the period 1989-2001 Ireland experienced the highest growth in alcohol consumption among EU countries, increasing 49% on a per capita basis. At the same time, consumption decreased in almost all other EU member states, with just four countries experienced a small increase.

Convenience stores are perfectly in tune with this binge culture. Most of these stores now sell a quasi-medicinal snake oil that, once consumed, promises you can batter your liver into a pulp at night and still face a full Irish breakfast meeting next morning. The idea of restraint is out of the question.

But there is absolutely nothing charming about public drunkenness, and I suspect that our visitors have the green-tinted spectacles dashed from their eyes fairly quickly when they spend a night or two in an Irish town.

Drunks, no matter what they might think, aren’t witty or particularly friendly, and their lilting accents sound pretty much like those of drunks anywhere in the world. And, especially on an occasion like St Patrick’s Day, they can be an embarrassment and a nuisance at best. In recent years they have become intrusive and menacing. By late evening of the national holiday, the streets are predictably destroyed with litter and discarded tricolours fighting for space with puddles of vomit.

So long as we cling to the notion that the “unique selling point” of Irishness is drunken fun, there is little chance of whipping up disapproval of excess drinking.

At the root of this attitude is low national self-esteem. Take away the drink, we fear, and we won’t be witty or charming at all.

It’s a real dilemma. If we did close the pubs and off-licences on St Patrick’s Day there is the possibility we will turn out to be spiritually Swedish. But if you try to cut back on your own drinking and avoid a round, you’ll be like Dev — the taint of tightfistedness will dog your family for generations to come.

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