The biggest drop in pub licences is in counties with large rural counties. So, can the Irish country pub survive in these changed times,writes CARL O'BRIEN
MOST NIGHTS, shortly after last orders, John Moore drives home the last of his customers home in his Ford Focus.
“They live within a two- or three-mile radius of the bar, so I don’t have to go too far,” says Moore, who owns Fogarty’s, a thatched pub in Crusheen, Co Clare, close to the Galway border.
“I drop them to their door, it’s the least you can do these days to hold onto your customers. That’s the way it’s gone.” He has seen dozens of other long-established pubs close their doors across the mid-west in recent years.
The reason, he says, is a combination of the smoking ban, stricter enforcement of drink-driving laws and the availability of cheap alcohol in shops. “It’s the supermarkets which are really killing the trade,” he says. “You can’t blame people, really. You can pick up a case of beer for €15.”
Fogarty’s, the typically quaint kind of pub that features on postcards and in tourist brochures, has been serving customers in Crusheen for more than 100 years – but Moore isn’t sure how much longer it will survive.
“Right now, it’s hard to make a wage out of it. I make just enough to pay the bills. I’m just about surviving. Trade is down about 40 per cent, but I’m determined to keep going as along as I can.”
“Pubs are the hub of the community, they’re a social outlet. This would be a big loss to the community. There are lots of farmers around here, they like to come in and talk about agriculture, hurling, the weather. It’s a social outlet. What’s the alternative? Drinking at home? Talking to yourself? I think we’d lose something vital.”
But is talk of the death of the Irish pub exaggerated? Vintners, who have traditionally been a political force to be reckoned with, have never been shy of highlighting how badly off they are. But the figures indicate they have a real point.
There were 7,616 pub licences in 2010, according to the Revenue Commissioners, down from 8,922 in 2005, a drop of around 1,300. Most of these licences have been disappearing from counties with a large rural population.
This doesn’t reflect a shift away from alcohol. Quite the contrary: we still have the third highest level of alcohol consumption in the world and we binge drink more than any other country in Europe.
Rather, it points to a massive shift towards purchasing cheaper alcohol in off-licences and supermarkets. Around half of all alcohol in Ireland is now sold in off-trade premises.
A recent European Commission report found Ireland is one of just a handful of countries where alcohol has become 50 per cent more affordable over the past 15 years.
And it is getting cheaper still. The latest Central Statistics Office data shows the price of alcohol is falling at a much faster rate than other good; between September 2009 and 2010, alcohol fell by almost 5 per cent, while average prices rose by 0.5 per cent.
The Vintners Federation of Ireland says the decline of the Irish pub will come with a heavy economic price: they still employ an estimated 50,000 people and generate around €2 billion in taxes; and they are the country’s number one tourist attraction.
For writer Bill Barich, the prospect of the death of the Irish pub is even more significant. Nothing less than the country’s national identity is at stake, he says.
Barich, a US author, has spent months travelling across the country in search of the quintessential Irish pub. For him, a good pub is a place with a strong sense of community, where the art of conversation flourishes, where the barman is concerned for the welfare of his patrons. In his travels throughout Ireland, however, he has been singularly disappointed.
In his book A Pint of Plain, published last year, Barich writes that the pubs he found were either lifeless museum pieces, ghastly sports bars festooned with multiple TV screens or fakes hawking manufactured nostalgia. The old grocery boxes and signs advertising tobacco at so many pubs are, Barich lamented, “just for show”. Throughout Ireland, literary giants like Joyce have been memorialised in ways that suggest they were regulars.
In addition, pub owners have to shoulder much of the blame, he says. By aligning themselves with the leisure industry, through quizzes, poker nights and karaoke, they are ruining the atmosphere of the pub. Elsewhere he despairs at a device that allows patrons pour their own pints, “thereby reducing the contact between people even further”.
But Barich concedes that culture doesn’t stand still. Many Irish people don’t lament the disappearance of old pubs. His determination to find an authentic Irish pub, he admits, is based primarily on a falsehood. For him, the quintessential pub has the low-key atmosphere and decor of Pat Cohan’s, the rural pub depicted in The Quiet Man – a pub designed and constructed on a Hollywood film-set.
People like Gerry Mellett, who runs the Ardattin Inn, a small pub in rural Co Carlow, remain upbeat about the future of the Irish pub.
“We’re working closely with Fáilte Ireland to agree on a set of pub standards to keep attracting the tourists,” says Mellett. “For locals, we’re doing initiatives like the ‘stars of our bars’, a kind of X Factor for pubs, which has gone down very well, along with pub quizzes, pool tournaments, darts competitions.” Not everything works out, though. He invested in a kitchen a couple of years ago and fitted out a restaurant alongside the pub. About 12 months ago, he was forced to close it down because it was losing too much money.
Mellett, who is president of the Licenced Vintner’s Federation, says those who invested heavily in new pubs during the boom years – and are now saddled with large borrowings and mounting debt – are among those who will find it hardest to survive. The rest, he says, must innovate, focus on the experience of the pub and give people a reason to socialise there.
“If you look at the market for alcohol, we used to have 90 per cent of it. Now, it’s down to around 46 per cent. Whatever way you look at it, there will be more casualties.”
The Government has a key role to play, Mellett says, in dealing with the availability of cheap alcohol in supermarkets; pubs could also do with a leg-up by relaxing the rates they have to pay and rolling out more State-funded rural transport schemes.
“This is something that is more important than just revenue or jobs,” Mellett says. “It’s about who we are as a people, about keeping these vital social outlets in the community. We know we can do more, like operating as tourism information centres or expanding what we do. But we also need all the assistance we can get.”