Expert tips for parents who discover that their teenager drinks alcohol.

Dr Gerry McCarney is a Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist. The HSE booklet, Alcohol and Drugs: A Parents’ Guide www.askaboutalcohol.ie also contains information on what to do if you think your child is taking drugs, how to handle resistance, your guide to parties, building resilience and handling emergency situations. ALCOHOL IS SO normalised in our society that we sometimes forget that supplying alcohol to someone under 18 without their parents’ permission is against the law. Christmas or not, giving drink to children is not just against the law it’s damaging to their developing bodies and brains. 

Mind yourself this Christmas: How to care for your mental health during the festive period.

CHRISTMAS TIME CAN be an incredibly stressful time for many people. Between the family members you only see once a year, the financial pressures and the feeling that you have too much to do and not enough time to do it in, December can be a particularly difficult time. It’s not unusual for someone living with a mental health condition to feel a bit overwhelmed by the festivities. It’s also not all that unusual for people without one to feel overwhelmed either.

No one would want to touch or eat faeces, but we do that by not washing our hands properly'.

This means using soap and water at home and alcohol gel in hospitals and clinics. The HSE said some people are washing their hands insufficiently, missing areas like the tips of their fingers. Professor Martin Cormican, HSE National Lead for Antibiotic Resistance, said: “Things that look clean often have billions of bacteria and viruses so you can pick them up from touching most surfaces.“It is really important that you clean your hands well with soap and water and then dry them on a paper (or clean) towel.

Shane Dunphy: The Irish state is a very bad parent when its children turn 18 they often end up on the streets.

Shane Dunphy is a child protection expert, author and broadcaster. He is Head of the Social Studies Department at Waterford College of Further Education. The first time I met James* it was at the beginning of the Christmas season, and he was being thrown out of a pub for causing a disturbance. He had arrived early that evening and had already consumed more than was good for him as the first of the work parties were coming in for their seasonal festivities.

Brave Rebeca Gyumi fought Tanzania’s child marriage laws and won.

She is widely known as the woman who fought for an end to child marriages in Tanzania and won. Tanzania is one of the African countries with the highest rates of child marriage in the world two out of every five girls marry before their 18th birthday with a prevalence rate of 37% nationwide, according to the country’s national demographic and health survey of 2015/16.