Chapter 6
Accounting for one in every three draught drinks bought in every pub in Ireland, it’s virtually impossible to explore the theme of drink in Ireland without taking account of the Guinness phenomenon. Symbolically, the logo of the harp, used by Guinness since 1862, was adopted by the Irish government in the 1920s, with the Guinness Harp facing left while the official government version, perhaps ironically, faced the other way. According to practically every travel guide to Ireland, no visit to the country is complete without sampling a pint of the black stuff or taking a visit to the Guinness Storehouse. And where better to hear firsthand about Ireland’s drinking culture than inside the gates of our most renowned brewery? The hallowed home of Guinness for the last 250 years is one of Ireland’s most frequented tourist sites, hosting an average of one million visitors per year—and all this just to see the past and present life of a working brewery! For many drinkers, it is, in essence, the equivalent of Charlie and his impoverished relations getting all-areas access to the Wonka factory. Visitors are often required to book their tickets days and weeks in advance to avoid the lengthy queues at the St James’s Gate site. Like Scotland and haggis, Guinness has become somewhat embedded in the imaging of Ireland, Inc., over the past 100 years and more. Lonely Planet guides can’t get enough of it, with instructions on Guinness etiquette and separate ‘fact boxes’ advising of the medicinal nature of Guinness, and telling would-be visitors that ‘one way to test the quality of a pint of Guinness is by examining the size of the rings of foam left inside your glass (the bigger and thicker the better). Remember: if it’s a good pint, order another one.’ What ever happened to four green fields and céad míle fáiltes?
I’d never been to the site, or even had a particular taste for Guinness during the good old bad old days of my drinking. Living in Cork, if stout was to be drunk it was more Beamish and Murphy’s, like. When I visited the Guinness Storehouse, on a rainy Thursday in February, stewards marshalled the lines of tourists waiting to be shown inside. What never ceases to amaze me is the sheer scale of the Guinness brewery, its absolutely pivotal place in the heart of the capital city. I’d only seen it from the outside, passing by having arrived in Dublin many times by train at Heuston Station. When Guinness owners Diageo tentatively approached a review of the Guinness operation at the site during the property boom (55 acres in the heart of Dublin was a tempting offload), the plans drew a furious public backlash, ensuring the site remains part of the brewing operation. For now, at least.
Plans are afoot to divide up the operation, with a new brewery being built in Leixlip, where Guinness heir Desmond Guinness, who still lives in the fairytale-gothic Leixlip Castle, has provided lands. (I was there to interview him once, as Marianne Faithful appeared ghostlike on the landing and Guinness himself whizzed about preparing for the visit of Jerry Hall that evening, unloading crates of wine from the boot of his car!) The Guinness family is rightly proud of their heritage and association with the emergence of the modern Irish state, having set up the Iveagh Trust, an initiative for homeless housing in Dublin, and been, for centuries, the largest taxpayers on the island. The family have also, particularly in the case of Desmond Guinness, been responsible for the re-appreciation of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Irish history and architecture, underlining the cultural and economic contribution Guinness has made to Ireland. The St James’s site itself has been turned into a sophisticated tourist experience, with interactive tours, archives, snazzy restaurants and bars, offering visitors panoramic views of the city while enjoying their complimentary pint. Previous to the present facility, the Guinness Hop Store catered for tourists, but by the year 2000, roughly 340,000 visitors per year were coming through its doors. The current tourist centre was a former derelict building which had blown up in 1987. In 1999, the company put £30 million (sterling) into the building, to act as a showcase site for their brand heritage. Here, the folklore of Ireland and its most synonymous alcoholic drink can be packaged, digitised, and delivered over the course of an afternoon. The majority of visitors come from the UK, Italy, the us and France, with the centre catering for up to 6,000 visitors a day during peak season.
As an ex-drinker, I’d be lying if I said the prospect of a complimentary pint at the end of the tour wasn’t a tempting offer. It’s times like that when alcohol can often catch you unawares. You might go weeks, months, a year even without thinking of the booze and its seductive qualities. Then BANG! While minding your own business, it comes calling again. In this case, the fact that everyone on the tour was given a glass of Guinness to enjoy underlined the apparent normality of taking a drink. It’s easy to be fooled into thinking that having a sup along with everyone else wouldn’t do any harm. In fact, it would be rude not to. The pint takes on the guise of a seductive woman, letting her dress slip off her shoulder, pursing her lips, and whispering enticingly, ‘Come, brush your lips against my rim, don’t worry, it’ll be our little secret.’ I usually answer the calling with thoughts of when I did drink and how distinctly unglamorous the whole thing was and how much of an eejit I made of myself. Like being unable to walk into a shop because of paranoia, or getting into a habit of taking my clothes off and running around gardens naked, while dinner guests looked on utterly bemused. That usually does the trick and helps put any cravings to bed. Counsellors call it rewinding or fast-forwarding the tape—I can’t remember which. All I know is that it works for me.
I took lunch at the Guinness Storehouse restaurant with two staff from the Corporate Relations team in an effort to find out how the company was performing, what drinking patterns had emerged over the past decade, and what the downturn held in store for the dark stuff. Corporate relations executive Rhonda Evans told me that in 2001, according to Diageo’s figures, 70 per cent of all alcohol in Ireland was sold in pubs. By 2008, that figure was down to 45 per cent, with 55 per cent sold in the off trade, representing a remarkable shift in Irish drinking patterns in a relatively short period of time. Several factors have been identified in accounting for this shift, including the simple fact that people were commuting longer hours to homes many of them had spent big on. Naturally, they want to showcase, enjoy and entertain in their plasma-screened palaces.
In the 1980s, the culture of going to the pub in the evening after work and before dinner was pretty well established in many urban centres. Now, with longer commutes, it can often be seven or eight in the evening before workers get home to dinner, leaving little time for a sociable drink in between.
Aside from the setting, people have also increased their repertoire of drinks, so they’re having wine with meals, as well as beer in the bar. The era of males drinking beer and beer alone disappeared, and now they are as likely to sip champagne, cider or gin and tonic. The rise in wine sales over the past decade has also been indicative of how quickly the Irish have taken to the supping in their own domestic environments.
Rising prices in bars didn’t help either. Of course, ask any publican, and they will tell you it was the smoking ban and drink-driving clampdown wot dunnit.
‘During the Celtic Tiger,’ says Rhonda Evans, ‘people were going on more holidays and experiencing different things so the pub wasn’t the sole entertainment experience. Restaurants became hugely popular, and still are. The move to home consumption was hugely dramatic and lots of people in the industry are still taking time to adjust to that.’
Not so in Diageo, though, whose brands include spirits, draught lagers, beers and stout. Rather than rue the demise of the public house, Diageo was quick to adapt to people’s changing social environments. So, they have bottles of beer, cans of beer, 12-packs, 6-packs, buy three and get a free glass, increased branding in supermarkets, instore promotions, mini-fridges, hats, scarves and headbands . . . the list goes on.
‘We put as much effort now into selling our brands in the off trade as we do in pubs,’ says Rhonda Evans. ‘Once we realised the shift in where people were consuming and buying, we moved too. You can’t make people go to the pub if they don’t want to choose.’
Undoubtedly the growth of the nightclub culture had an impact, with shots and bottles becoming the late-night beverage of choice. There was a period in Ireland in the early 1990s when sales took a dip, especially among younger drinkers. Towards the end of that decade, Ireland was topping binge-drinking leagues in Europe, with the trend peaking in 2001. For now, though, Guinness is back in vogue (and having a huge upsurge in business in Asia and Africa). It has had to adapt quickly and Guinness spent a lot of time and money getting the Guinness can product right, so that the pour quality at home would be the same as in the pub. It’s worked, with over 60 per cent of people drinking Guinness in the pub now buying cans to drink at home also. Those with increasingly hectic work lives, who couldn’t afford to wake up mid-week with a hangover, were also catered for. Guinness mid-strength has been on trial for the past two years. Instead of 4.2 per cent ABV (alcohol by volume), it has a low of 2.8 per cent. The company calls it a ‘slow burner’, but with the government indicating it will give lower duty rates for the product, it looks here to stay.
Alcohol consumption in Ireland per capita has been declining by between 10 per cent and 20 per cent since 2001. This was a period of almost full employment, of large inward migration and of a general atmosphere of immediacy and excess.
During the last 12 months of 2008, excise duty on alcohol was down 10 per cent, although due to lower vat levels, cross-border purchases have risen dramatically. Industry insiders point to the fact that one in six households went up to the North between September and December 2008, with the off trade in Northern Ireland increasing by 23 per cent. Most problem drinking in Ireland is now more concentrated during the Thursday-to-Saturday period and it remains to be seen how the downturn will affect drinkers and drinking patterns in the coming decade.
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If there is one thing Guinness is good at (besides brewing), it’s marketing and advertising. Bar Coca-Cola, the company was one of the first major drinks companies in the 1920s to launch mass advertising campaigns. In recent years, the company has taken flak for its sponsorship campaigns and for launching a ‘drink responsibly’ campaign only after binge-drinking figures had peaked. Many felt that Diageo, like other members of the drinks industry, were only too willing to add to the corporate till in the decades previous and failed to fully engage with the issue of problem drinking in Ireland.
While the company has always been aware of its citizenship role, from sponsoring charities to good causes, in recent years it has developed more and more its corporate social responsibility role, in response perhaps to a wider understanding of Ireland’s relationship with alcohol. From a Diageo Ireland point of view, this policy has been gathering a huge amount of momentum in the last 10 years, and Diageo point to the fact that they were the first drinks company in Ireland to communicate to consumers the benefits of responsible drinking. So, for example, they launched the ‘Don’t see a Good Night Wasted’ advertising campaign in 2002, followed by the ‘Wake Up Call’ campaign, which saw a guy going through the horrors of the night before while waking up next morning.
Eventually, perhaps recognising that self-regulation is better than imposed rule, the industry set up an organisation called MEAS, which is an independent charity working to engage in the area of consumer communications through brands such as Drink Aware. ‘The ultimate aim is to change behaviours and attitudes also,’ says spokesperson Jean Doyle. ‘At the moment as an industry we are in the midst of a five-year plan delivering a twenty-million [euro] fund dedicate[d] to the area of awareness and education. Everybody appreciated that the industry needed to focus on this area. There were issues around how certain brands and certain types of things were being promoted. We believe that self-regulation and co-regulation is the best way forward.’
It’s noticeable that in recent campaigns by MEAS, the focus has shifted from the individual drinker, regretting his/her actions on a night out, to looking at the impact that person has on their direct environment. So the A&E nurse, the shopkeeper and the taxi driver all relay the impact problem drinking is having on their lives. It’s an effort, then, for a collective response by society to a problem which reaches every sector.
As Jean Doyle notes: ‘At times the industry can be the whipping boy. We should of course be around the table when people are talking about alcohol misuse, but there are other areas of responsibility, be it government policing and enforcement of existing legislation, or parents or the individual. Ultimately there is a strong need for individuals to take responsibility for their own behaviour, and that’s one thing very relevant in the Irish context. If there is a cultural acceptance of getting drunk, and how much you drink and all that macho stuff around it continues to be acceptable, then it is very difficult.’
Despite their endeavours, suspicion remains in some quarters that the drinks industry’s efforts in relation to responsible drinking are mere public relations exercises designed to soften legislation. Advertising continues to be a bugbear of critics of the industry, and certain quarters call for a complete ban on alcohol advertising in Ireland, much like the French model. ‘In relation to advertising we have the most strictly regulated advertising and sponsorship activity,’ says Jean Doyle. ‘The French model hasn’t proven a link between the reduction in misuse and the ban on advertising. However, we are already very highly taxed and [governed] by stringent legislation.’
New controls mean that drinks companies are not allowed to advertise in any medium where less than 75 per cent of the audience are over 18 (most European norms are 70 per cent).
But does the use of stringent controls make it right that national sports, such as hurling and Gaelic football, are so heavily identified with brands such as Guinness?
‘If you take the GAA, Guinness came in behind hurling at a time when it wasn’t as popular. Everything that was done was considered appropriate by the GAA. We [see] that things like filling sports cups with alcohol is not on, that signage in the stadium is less than twenty-five per cent of any advertising that’s there. The whole thing has been stripped back. As far as we are concerned it is absolutely appropriate if it is done right.’
Yet the drinks industry spends roughly €70 million in Ireland on advertising each year. Guinness is at the heart of several high-profile sports campaigns, including sponsorship of GAA and rugby.
Recently, the Observer Sports Magazine, when profiling Croke Park, had the following to say: ‘Guinness is the somewhat predictable sponsor of the Irish rugby union team. Technically, “the black stuff” isn’t actually black, but a dark ruby red colour due to some of the malted barley being roasted. Ten million pints are bought worldwide every day; a recent survey found that 70 per cent of Irish respondents “felt closer to Guinness” as a result of their sponsorship of the team. Heartwarming.’
In terms of general drinking patterns, Diageo, like most drinks companies, are at pains to point out that problem drinking does nothing for their business model and that advertising is aimed at moderate drinkers.
‘It is in none of our interest[s] to see people being drunk, it damages our reputation and the environment in which we can legitimately operate,’ says Jean Doyle. ‘From a business point of view, the responsible drinking agenda within Diageo is about investing in longer-term consumers of our brands—people who do themselves damage do other people damage also. We don’t want to be trite, but Guinness is two hundred and fifty years old, and it’s not in our interest for people to abuse it and for it to become associated with the problem.’
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Established in 1998, the Guinness archive makes Diageo the only corporate body in Dublin to host their own public archives. With two staff, the facility is a mine of social and economic history. But, to be perfectly honest and juvenile about it, I really only wanted to know two things—how many free drinks did workers get down through the years, and is Guinness really good for you? Since its opening the staff have been gathering and amalgamating documents spread out over the site. Underneath the offices were 3,000 linear metres of paper records, containing 10,000 images, a few hundred cans of film and all sorts of signage, instruments and oddities related to the brewing operation, including the original lease Arthur Guinness signed on the St James’s Gate site in 1759 as well as brewing recipes from the 1790s. About one third of the collection has been catalogued to date, and aside from throwing light on Irish drinking patterns, it also gives an insight into Irish economic and social history, with somewhere in the region of 14,000–16,000 employee files.
Prior to WWI, the workforce was almost 5,000 strong (mostly males), undertaking what was tough physical labour, and being paid 10–20 per cent higher than the average industrial wage in Dublin at the time. Pensions were introduced in the 1880s, at least 30 years before the first National Pension Act came into being. A medical centre was also established in the late nineteenth century for employees and their families. Dublin has always had a housing crisis of sorts, and recognising this, Guinness first started building accommodation for employees in the 1880s with the Rialto Flats and nearby Thomas Court scheme. The company was, in many respects, akin to a mini-Statelet.
Or, as archivist Eibhlin Roche notes, ‘Guinness has been an all-inclusive company and such an integral part of the Irish story. We estimate that by about 1930, one in ten people in Dublin were dependent on Guinness for their livelihood.’
When workers went into pubs to unwind after a day’s graft, their choice of beverage was slightly less complicated than it is today—there was whiskey or there was Guinness. That lack of choice pretty much stayed that way until the 1950s and 1960s, when lager arrived in Ireland. Although thirsty Guinness workers didn’t need to stray all that far for the sup. Three taps were located on site for workers, and instead of a tea break, they could opt for ‘time at the taps’. Men who lined up with their tankards were allowed fill once. For every hour of overtime worked, the entitlement increased (each four hours’ overtime resulted in an extra beer—it would cripple the public service!). The taps closed down some time in the 1970s and the policy changed to take-home beer, such as cans and bottles, a policy that remains to the present day.
Despite allegations from medical professionals that higher volume beers helped fuel today’s binge-drinking culture, the alcohol by volume (ABV) in the present-day pint of Guinness hasn’t changed all that much since its inception. One product, foreign extra stout bottles, which is on sale in Africa and Asia, would have been brewed in the 1800s with a very high ABV rate to enable it to withstand long sea journeys. This was done by adding extra hops into the beer, thereby increasing its longevity. It is still on sale today at 7.5 per cent ABV. But the foreign stuff is the exception; today’s pint of Guinness is the baby of the family, only 50 years old and remaining at 4.2–4.3 per cent ABV since its launch. The general trend for Guinness has been for a fall in ABV since WWI, when additional taxes were placed on barley for beer use. After the war, the ABV never quite reached its pre-First World War years.
Pretty much since the beginning, Guinness was considered good for you. So much so, in fact, that mothers who had just given birth were given a glass of Guinness in maternity wards all over the country as a matter of course. Is there a more insightful example of a country’s relationship with alcohol? ‘It was pretty much widespread for any woman who had given birth, because of iron levels, to be given Guinness,’ says archivist Eibhlin Roche. ‘I mean, up until pretty recently, if you gave blood with any of the blood banks, you were given either a cup of tea or a half pint of Guinness. The company would have provided stock to the Blood Bank and also the maternity hospitals free of charge.’
The association between Guinness and good health, or in other words between alcohol and vitality and robustness, has even deeper roots. The word ‘porter’ derived from the 1700s, when this new dark beer was being produced for the first time and became very popular very quickly with market porters in places like Covent Garden. It had perceived strengthening qualities. The adoption of the name of the beer, then, in the 1700s linked it to this idea that the beer had strength-giving qualities. When Guinness first advertised in 1929, the advertising agency went around to bars in London, asking punters why they were drinking Guinness. Nine out of 10 said because it was good for them. Guinness wasn’t alone at the time, with products like Bovril and smelling salts also advertising their supposed strength-giving dimension, yet somehow with Guinness the tag stuck.
From the early 1930s up until the outbreak of WWII, the company actively encouraged doctors to advocate Guinness for their patients. The archive has hundreds of letters of correspondence from GPS across the UK and Ireland lauding the medicinal properties of the beer and telling how it transformed the lives and ailments of their patients. This kind of begs the question: if that was the attitude of the medical professionals, what chance had wider society to keep tabs on its drinking?
Or maybe it’s perfectly normal for alcohol to be prescribed as medicine and Guinness really is good for you? Dr Chris Luke, consultant in emergency medicine at the Mercy Hospital in Cork, takes a benign view of Guinness. ‘I liken it to Rowntree’s or Quaker Oats, to be honest. I think Guinness have a long and very noble philanthropic tradition, in terms of the Iveagh Trust and providing accommodation for workers and so on. My understanding also is that one of their first medical officers travelled to Germany at the turn of the nineteenth century and visited their systems, bringing a lot of the efficiency there back with him. In addition to that Guinness also had a huge reputation in areas like training in first aid and safety and [in] funding the St John’s Ambulance service.’
When asked, though, whether the product itself was good for you and whether it would still be appropriate in Ireland of 2009 to offer it to patients, Dr Luke said:
‘I would like to think that in 2009 we are beginning to leave behind powdered vitamins and distilled chemicals. I am firmly of the belief that foods can be much better than medicine and Guinness is a foodstuff. It comes down to this, really—how would you prefer to get your iron, vitamin[s] and needed calories into a patient? By pill or injection or by a pint of the black stuff? The bottom line, same when prescribing any medicine, is that if you stick to the right dose, then a patient will get the required iron and vitamins. In the early nineteen-eighties, I remember when I was an intern in St Vincent’s Hospital in County Wexford and we prescribed whiskey and brandy at night to patients. I think it was a very valuable tradition. For example, if your seventy-five-year-old grandmother is used to a sherry at night before admittance, then in my experience it’s much better to continue with that small glass in hospital than to give a Valium. Many people have learned the hard way that chemical substitutes can be a lot more addictive than a glass of sherry. I’m not encouraging or recommending a free-for-all, but if you’re asking me if a glass of Guinness can be medicinally useful, then I think yes, it can.’
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Following the conversation by phone with Dr Luke, I was interested in the wider role alcohol plays in society, and how alcohol and health impact on a day-to-day basis in one of Ireland’s hospitals. So I arranged to meet Dr Luke at the Mercy Hospital. When I got there, at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, he began our meeting by taking me through a labyrinth of corridors, past makeshift waiting rooms, canteens turned into consulting areas, overstretched staff and impatient patients. While he wanted to set in context his thoughts on drink, Irish society and its implications on health, he also wanted to show what the second A&E unit in Ireland’s second city looks like at what should be a relatively quiet time. He says whatever past impression there may have been of the medicinal properties of specific brews, 55 per cent of all patients who pass through the Accident and Emergency doors are there because of alcohol-related illnesses or incidents. Having said that, he’s not fully discarding the general medicinal properties of alcohol and its benefits for society.
‘About ninety per cent of us drink,’ he says. ‘We love to drink and regard it quite rightly as a divine gift and I have a lot of sympathy for that idea. I’m interested in toxicology. I’m interested in herbal medication and drugs, both clinical and illegal, because they have such an impact on my work in lectures to parents. So you have cocoa leaf in the Andes and you have cannabis in Afghanistan. Wherever you go, particularly where the landscape is hostile, you often get tucked away in the undergrowth a divine emollient, which eases the grim predicament of existence, to quote Beckett. I’ve absolutely no problem with the fact there are natural entities that have a God-given purpose to be there. If you are a native Andean Indian struggling in the low-oxygen height of rugged terrain in the Andes, lifting granite blocks to build Aztec temples—why not chew cocoa leaf?’
While the Guinness brewing operation stretches back 250 years, Dr Luke points to the fact that the Irish have always had a relationship with mind- and mood-altering substances long before the Guinness family got in on the act.
‘Our remedies seem to be mushrooms and alcohol and those are the truly ancient intoxicants. I often joke that the reason we have such fabulous Celtic mythology is because of fabulous Celtic mushrooms! That’s partly humorous, but I’m certain psychadelia has a role to play in Celtic mythology and Celtic culture and designs and much of that has come from mushrooms. Similarly with alcohol, we have had alcohol since the dawn of time, with mead and beer and cider, so I mean it’s utterly natural.’
The difference nowadays, he says, is in concentration of alcohol in products and in the range available. ‘Fast forward the last five hundred to one thousand years of globalisation, which really means the conquistadors and the taking over of the American wilderness and the taking over of Australia. In tandem with that has been the taking back of exotic fruits and drugs. By the time we get to [the] year 2000, at the peak of the Celtic Tiger, the population who are well used to mushrooms and drink suddenly have access to all this exotic range of intoxicants and also have the money to afford it. What we have is the native natural alcohol consumption suddenly multiplied by increasing concentration of the alcohol. In addition to that, you have the consumption of other drugs that are relatively new to our culture.’
In terms of concentration, while Guinness may buck the trend by offering lower-strength ranges, the general trend over the last two decades has been for higher concentrations of alcohol in the majority of products. ‘What happened is that in the last twenty years we have seen an increase in the concentration—a doubling, effectively. It’s very difficult now to go into any shop and to get less than fourteen per cent alcohol in a bottle of wine, for example. That’s a fact, so in a sense, drugs fuelled drink consumption and drink fuels drug consumption and that’s what’s new. So you have both a diversity and scale which is new and that’s where I come in. The impact on the Emergency department is really [astonishing] if you look at it very carefully. My own feeling is that many attendances to A&E departments are fuelled by drink and drugs. Nearly one third of the population of Ireland attend an A&E department every year, which is good reason for investing in them, and we’re talking in excess of 1.25 million people. I’m convinced that more than fifty per cent come to hospital urgently, suddenly, unexpectedly, because of drink- or drug-fuelled mishap or ailment. I’m also including tobacco. I’m talking about shots of alcohol, which are extraordinarily strong compared to what they were twenty or thirty years ago. I’m talking about drink-fuelled consumption of cocaine. I’m talking about the misuse of marginally legal drugs from head shops. I’m talking about the misuse of over-the-counter drugs, inappropriate prescriptions of drugs by doctors. If you put it all together, I’m certain that it adds up to the majority of our patients. So it’s quite an extraordinary figure and the bottom line is that this all results from, in my view, an increase in concentration of alcohol, not the volume.’
Dr Luke points out that alcohol consumption levels have been moving upwards since the late 1950 or 1960s, as the Irish economy has gone through economic and social changes and improvements. ‘In the last fifteen years, we have seen a normalisation of intoxication of both . . . genders,’ he says. ‘Women are now beginning to overtake men in terms of binge-drinking and liver failure and young girls are beginning to overtake teenage boys in terms of premature presentations.’ He notes that companies like Diageo have been saying consumption has stabilised and says he’s ‘optimistic our dwindling prosperity will bring some kind of dip in the overall volume consumed’. He seems to be agreeing with the drinks industry—that a comprehensive, multifaceted approach to the issue of problem drinking in Ireland is what is needed. ‘My main concern is the numbers, rather than the style or morality or philosophical issues. Ultimately, it’s figures we need to think about, and my own feeling is that we should really try to define or describe the scale of the problem numerically. I really think that police should screen for alcohol or cannabis or cocaine in anybody that has been arrested for violence or disorder. I really think we have to measure alcohol measures in almost every patient for a period of time until we get some sort of idea.’
In terms of our drinking habits, the industry has a huge role to play in lowering the ABV levels. ‘I don’t think we should worry about volume; I think we should stop concentrating. What I mean by that is that the shots culture is the embodiment of catastrophic concentration. So you’re moving from Babycham, light ales, Indian ales and little sherries of the 1970s and 1960s, to these high concentrations of alcohol with forty per cent and fifty per cent which are actually lethal.’
Dr Luke says his ambition over the next 20 years would be to see wine dropping back towards 7 per cent and 8 per cent ABV and beer dropping back towards 3 per cent and 4 per cent.
‘That means that we can return to the ancient order of pub culture, which worked so well for so many years in Ireland. Paradoxically I think that pubs have a lot to offer in terms of stabilising our culture. Going to the pub in Ireland in the 1970s it was perfectly possible to go to a snug and sit chatting for hours and hours and hours while nursing just half a pint of beer. Because that’s all you could afford. There is nothing inherently impossible about nursing half a pint of shandy, even, for hours at a time. The atmosphere in the pubs has been so altered by the Celtic Tiger, particularly, that the atmosphere is often hostile or menacing and not conducive to conversation. I yearn for the days when we can revive our oral tradition, because that is what was great about Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s. It was about conversation and comedy and creativity and that, to me, is what craic was. It was obviously lubricated to some extent by libation, but it was fundamentally about conversation.’
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The decline of the bar trade is therefore a cause for concern, not just for the drinks industry and health professionals, but also for wider society. Diageo company representatives had pointed out that off-trade or at-home drinking is not regulated in any regard, while ‘on-premise’ consumption is very highly regulated. The move from pub to at-home drinking has also had repercussions for another sector of the drinks industry, often seen as the whipping boys for the ills of Ireland’s association with alcohol. I’m talking, of course, about nightclubs.
The clubbing scene gathered pace in the 1970s and 1980s, but really came into its own commercially in the 1990s, with the rise of the dance scene and new drugs such as Ecstasy. In the days before late-night bar licences, a proper night out wasn’t complete without a visit to a club. Dr Luke has studied the club culture, and firmly links the alcohol epidemic to the rise of the drug scene and vice versa. ‘You can’t have one without the other; one of the reasons we have such increasing concentration of alcohol consumed, in my opinion, is because of the advent of Ecstasy in the late 1980s. The acid house culture meant that the drinks industry were suddenly threatened by a collapse in their profits and they retaliated, as it were, by employing the designers who had brought the music and clubs and fashion and so forth, to the deployment of vehicles of drink. They also increased the strength of drink from the 1970s to the 1990s. So you end up with psychedelic drinks, coloured, blue, green, any kind of neon, and delivered in very trendy sexy vehicles that were very sweet and very tasty, particularly to young women.’
Dr Luke has a point, and for anyone who experienced the clubbing mecca of Sir Henry’s nightclub in Cork or any other thriving nightclub in the 1990s and 2000s, there weren’t many pints of the black stuff being poured! In earlier chapters, I referred to the allure with which nightclubs in small towns, such as the Queens in Ennis, were viewed in local folklore. They were sites of almost limitless possibility, where dreams were made, and many a nightmare began well before the chip van had pulled away. In the first few years of sobriety, I went to a few clubs, but for me, sobriety and late-night clubbing just don’t gel. Some clubs, where the focus is more on music and ambience, can be tolerated, but generally the drinking den/cattle-mart variety holds little appeal for the non-drinker. Many of the clubs I frequented in the 1990s and 2000s are gone now (Sir Henry’s was knocked down a few years back), although the Queens in Ennis is still going strong. In the bar of the Harcourt Street Hotel, in the heart of Dublin’s nightclub sector, I met with Barry O’Sullivan, the Chief Executive of the Irish Nightclub Association (INA), who told me about the decline of the sector and how the industry is calling for extended opening hours and how changing drinking patterns have impacted on his members. By the year 2000, the association estimates that there were 530 nightclubs in Ireland—in 2007 this figure had shrunk to 330. ‘The rise of nightclub culture grew from the late 1970s and 1980s. The biggest change that happened for nightclubs since that growth was in 2000, when government removed the requirement for nightclubs to serve meal[s]. That gave birth to what we all know now as late bars,’ explains Barry O’Sullivan.
The nightclub sector has noticed fundamental shifts in drinking patterns over the last decade. Whilst typically, clubs are now aimed at the 18–35 age group, many have installed so called ‘VIP’ rooms to cater for those of an older age. Late bars have prospered among this age group, with brighter lighting, lower music and a more relaxed environment, and less emphasis on dancing and more on continuing drinking. It is estimated that up to 3,000 late bar licences now exist nationally.
‘In the 1990s, if you wanted do go anywhere past pub hours, you had to go to a nightclub and there were queues in every nightclub as a consequence. To be honest, businesses didn’t have to put a whole lot of imagination into their product; they really just had to open the doors. If you look at the average club now, they are promoting their business hard, from websites where in some cases each actual night of the club will have its own Bebo page.’
Having run a club in Temple Bar for eight years, O’Sullivan said the notion that everyone rushes to the counter for the last hour of drinking time, loading up on high volumes of shots, is simply not the case. He also says that the nightclub sector is often blamed unfairly for fuelling the binge drinking culture and points to other factors, such as the tendency for clubbers and pubgoers to begin the night at home with a few drinks.
‘In terms of drinking habits, it’s one of the misconceptions out there I have to deal with, especially from politicians when they talk about binge-drinking. As a sector, we know that sixty per cent of young clubbers will have one to three drinks at home before they leave. They will visit three or four bars on a night out, and have one or two drinks in each venue. We know also that the average consumer in a nightclub will have 2.7 drinks over the course of a night. So the nightclub is at the end of the course of the night’s drinking, and thirty per cent of it is done before they ever leave the house. That’s what is happening in Ireland today.’
To back up his claims of how society scapegoats the nightclub sector, O’Sullivan makes reference to the Heaven nightclub in Blanchardstown. In 2007, security staff turned away 29,000 customers, mostly on Saturday nights, for being intoxicated. Many clubs in Temple Bar will turn away 200–300 people during the course of a night, which highlights the sheer scale of alcohol abuse being carried out, if nothing else. ‘Look, there is no value to us in letting customers into our venue who are intoxicated. All it takes is for someone who has had too much bump into someone and injure them and [it] could cost us thirty thousand euro.’
The point the nightclub industry consistently hammers home is that the majority of drinkers are now fuelling up before leaving the house. This is borne out also by the experience of well known bar and club owner Paul Montgomery in Cork. Montgomery is the owner of one of the busiest nightclubs in Cork, Reardons, as well as several other late bar venues. He also owns a block of student accommodation, which he opened with a bar on the ground floor. Several months in, the bar was replaced with an off-licence. ‘He then sees this migration of young people from their apartments, bypassing the five bars he owns and going into nightclubs for a dance,’ says Barry O’Sullivan, ‘I think the nightclub offering will hold up better than the pub offering as we go deeper into recession. The pub offering can be reproduced in the home environment, where cheap drink can save money. You can get friends over and put on some good music and watch sports or whatever on plasma-style televisions. So the pub, now, can come to the punter in their sitting room. The downside to drinking at home, of course, is that you’re looking at the same faces all the time, and people still want to go out! And that’s where nightclubs will come in.’
The sector is lobbying hard for closing times to be extended from the current 2.30 a.m. limit to 4 a.m. in Dublin, the reason being that the volume of nightclubs in Dublin is greater than anywhere else in the country. For instance, in Harcourt Street within 200 yards of each other are four prominent nightclubs—Copperface Jacks, D/Two, Krystle and Tripod. Between them they can churn 8,000 punters onto the street at the same time.
The whole city of Cork has nightclub licences for 16,000 persons, showing the high density of clubbers catered for in Dublin. Also the sector is looking for government to introduce permits which would recognise the difference between normal bars and nightclubs—currently no such legislation exists. ‘The Guards have come to realise that restricted trading hours don’t lead to an improvement in public order,’ says O’Sullivan. ‘Our thinking is that putting everyone on the streets at the one time creates problems.’
One gets the feeling, though, those problems exist regardless.
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A more recent development in terms of Ireland’s drinking history has been the high number of pub closures over the past decade. Reports estimate that somewhere in the region of 1,500 pubs have closed over the last six years, or almost 10 bars a week. The drinks industry expect a further 9,000 jobs to be lost in the industry in 2009, which could represent a 20 per cent reduction when taken along with 2008 figures.
What trends are showing is that alcohol is leaving the main street and crossroads and becoming more and more an acceptable part of the home environment. The days when alcohol in the home consisted of a dusty bottle of sherry, taken out once a year when Aunt Vera arrived, seem a distant memory, oral fragments of another time. Now, weekly shopping baskets are as likely to have a six-pack of beer or shoulder bottle of spirits thrown in. A casual visit by a next-door neighbour, or a night in watching a movie, is enough to prompt the opening of a bottle of wine. In many ways we’re returning to a more medieval style of drinking, less evocative of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century forms. The changing nature of community has seen the closure of corner shops and post offices—not just in Ireland. With the erosion of community spirit, there is an increasing sense of loneliness and isolation in rural communities and anonymity in our urban ones.
With alcohol, those feelings can be muted. The difficulty, too, in Ireland is one of perception. If Guinness really is good for you, and red wine proposed as the cure for a host of ailments, then what’s the big deal?
Ireland, Inc., continues to hold Guinness dear as one of its flagship and defining brands, like the Cliffs of Moher or Kerrygold.
Some of that is down to the pioneering efforts of that company over the last 250 years to provide for its workers and their families. Like Fr Mathew in Cork, benevolent deeds live long in the folk culture.
Yet the fixation on Guinness in Ireland, the pride in the pint, and the closeness of branding between Ireland and a pint of the black stuff, suggest a deeper forging of identity between the people and its pint.
The fact that the brewery remains our largest tourist attraction—not the areas of breathtaking scenery or the historical monuments, but a working brewery—says much about perceptions of Ireland abroad. Yet they are perceptions we have not denied. From American presidents to Ryder Cup captains, the thing to do in Ireland is to have a pint; only then can the visitor go truly native. Yet as trends change over the next decade, those perceptions will be challenged. The cost of the craic, both financially and socially to the state, may place pressure on the branding of Ireland, Inc.
When the Ryder Cup was won on Irish soil in 2006, captains and players celebrated by downing pints of the black stuff in one gulp, to a TV audience of millions, all the while egged on by thousands of cheering spectators. Is that the epitome, the sum total, of what defines the national spirit?
We think nothing of having a drinks company sponsor our national sports. Road traffic accidents on weekends and late nights spiral, accident and emergency wards struggle to cope with the casualties of alcohol abuse, and our few alcohol treatment centres are starved of funding. Still, though, the national image continues unabated and unaltered.
As Bono might say, I don’t mean to bug you.