A former health minister says that time and lives have been squandered due to the fact Northern Ireland never enacted minimum alcohol pricing.

Jim Wells, who was health minister during 2014/15, said that he had wanted to introduce the measure when he was in post – and, had he stayed there another six months, he would have moved to do so.

The measure is now being considered by the health minister, UUP MLA Mike Nesbitt.

Mr Nesbitt told Stormont’s health committee this week he is now mulling over what a minumum price per unit of alcohol should be.

placeholder image — Former health minister Jim Wells

Such a law already exists in Scotland, and has done since 2012.

There, the minimum cost per unit is 65p.

For context, a can of Harp lager is roughly 1.6 units, and a quarter-bottle of whiskey is about 8 units.

The idea is not to curb drinking in pubs, which would be unaffected because they almost always sell alcohol well above any minimum unit price, but to raise the price of supermarket and off-licence fare such as cheap vodka and extra-strength cider.

Mr Wells said such an idea is a “no-brainer” and “should have happened”.

"It’s 10 years since I was health minister and, I mean, that is a wasted opportunity,” he said.

"How many lives have been lost, and also how many hospital beds occupied, how many police hours used up?

"I had the misfortune to be in an A&E in the local hospital here at 3am in July. This was at the weekend.

"If you took away the people who were [on] drink, and obviously drugs, the place would’ve been quite quiet.

"At one stage I thought the only people who were sober in that waiting room were me and the nurse behind the desk.

"The police were bringing people in, carrying them in, completely out of their mind on drink.

"Undoubtedly you could contact people who’d say: ‘oh this is the nanny state – this is terrible’.

"Well, they don’t bring up the ‘nanny state’ when we have to pump them out and save their lives from alcohol levels.

"At the end of the day, this was tens of millions of pounds a year which was coming out of the health service budget to deal with those people when there was an option for it not to happen.”

Stephen Magorrian is the managing director of Botanic Inns, which runs a string of venues in Belfast.

On the idea of minimum unit pricing, he told the News Letter: “It’ll have no effect on us.

"It’s only going to affect really off-sales. But I think it’s the right thing to do.

"I think threre are cheap products out there that need to be controlled in some way and that’s what this is helping to do.

"It’s your super-strength ciders, it’s your cheap vodkas, it’s that type of thing that’d be affected. But it’ll have little or no effect at all on the ‘on’ trade [as opposed to ‘off sales’].”

Could it even boost pub attendance by narrowing the gap between drinking at home and in a bar?

"I don’t think so,” he said. “It’s not geared to drive people to pubs. I think it’s more a case of trying to make it more difficult for those abusing cheap alcohol to get it. Hopefully it’ll have positive health implications.”