It sounds like an Irish joke. Last week a pub with no booze opened in central Dublin.

The Virgin Mary bar is the latest addition to that city’s nightlife, and its owner Vaughan Yates claims it is Ireland’s only permanent alcohol-free bar.

It looks like a pub, and keeps pub opening hours, but only sells beer, wine and cocktails with zero per cent alcohol. And he seems to think it will work.

“From birth to death, baptism to funeral, Ireland has a drinking culture,” Mr Yates – an Englishman – confidently declares.

“It’s part of the lifestyle. But Ireland is changing.”

Now there’s no doubt he’s right in one respect. Ireland is changing. The once devoutly Catholic Republic of Ireland is now much more liberal and secular and the Catholic church no longer runs the show.

In Northern Ireland violence hasn’t vanished, as the killing of Lyra McKee hideously proved. There will always be fears that it could flare up again.

But tourism is emerging, the atmosphere is a lot less tense, and I’m happy that my niece and nephew are growing up with no concept of how it was when I was their age.

Some change is good and some change is bad. But a change to alcohol-free pubs is just bewildering.

Yet people in Ireland are definitely drinking less. According to the World Health Organisation, alcohol consumption there has fallen by about a quarter in 10 years – from the equivalent of 14.2 litres of pure alcohol per person in 2005 to 10.9 in 2016.

A European school survey the same year showed a steep fall in underage drinking. As in Britain, pubs there are closing at an alarming rate.

The dangers of drinking are well known, though the advice about it is often contradictory.

UK Government guidelines have reduced the safe number of units per week from 21 to 14. Other reports say that no level is safe. Another, last year, suggested that middle-aged moderate drinkers are at less risk of dementia than those who never drink.

But just as a car is safe if it’s driven properly and carefully, so alcohol – part of western culture for millennia – can also be safe with due care and attention.

In reporting on this new alcohol-free pub, the Irish Times asked the question: “Can you lose the booze and keep the craic?”

I’m not sure you can.

Some of the funniest evenings of my student days, and probably anybody’s student days, were lubricated with alcohol, even if they’re hardly remembered in detail. A little bit of Dutch courage has come in handy over the years.

Even when you’re older, a group of friends having a laugh in the pub on the odd Friday or Saturday night probably does more good than harm.

Many people occasionally enjoy beer irresponsibly. But for most of us it doesn’t end in a fight in a takeaway or taxi queue or vomiting over your shoes.

The fact is that booze is deeply embedded in British and Irish society. That might not be a good thing, but it would be impossible to remove without starting our society from scratch all over again.

And we tend to have a very black and white, negative versus positive attitude towards alcohol. In the film Shirley Valentine, Shirley pours herself a glass of wine before making the dinner and says: “I’m wicked, aren’t I?”

This is an attitude we’ve inherited from our Judeo-Christian tradition that divides things into clear categories of good and evil, innocent and sinful. We’ve mostly placed alcohol on the evil side.

We saw that simplistic moralising last year when two youngsters with severe epilepsy, 12-year-old Billy Caldwell and seven-year-old Alfie Dingley, looked set to be denied the cannabis oil that led to dramatic improvements for them.

All the evidence showed how beneficial it was, but still there was a reluctance to admit that cannabis could be good.

Perhaps what we need to do is move away from a simple belief that good things are good, bad things are bad, and that’s all there is to it.

In the meantime, it will be interesting to see how The Virgin Mary bar gets on.

I suspect its prospects aren’t good. Then again no-one thought that Ireland’s ban on indoor smoking and compulsory plastic bag charge would work, yet they did – and the UK later copied both ideas.

Will alcohol-free bars become another Irish export, just like Guinness, Jameson’s whiskey and Magner’s cider?