Almost 2000 pubs closed since 2005

[Louther]

There is lots of reasons pubs are not as business as there were. It's not just one but many.

The Irish culture has changed from 80/90s where everything was based round your own locality and a holiday was a trip to Galway/Donegal/Wexford/Kerry depending where you lived. Well off people got to Spain or France. Filthy rich got to America.

Disposal income didn't have many homes. It was spent on entertainment and this was limited to the pub.

Young people lived at home longer. Buying a home when marrying. They got own car later in life. Was no WiFi, phones, streaming etc.

This started to move in the 00s. People travelled more, bought more, rented, etc

Now look at where we are.

There is so much more of everything. A good reflection is always round your GAA club and see the situation there.

Young players, even at college or in school, many have their own cars.
At college or working, they'll have a couple of trips abroad, take in a trip or two to Uk, trips to concerts, weekends with GF away. They travel a lot.
They spend money on phones, streaming, Apps, etc
They eat out more, buy take away coffee, milkshakes, etc
They have lots of good gear, 2/3 pairs of boots, lose a pair of gloves a week and replacement them etc
Hair cuts most weeks, bare I say some even get waxed, tan shop visits etc.

There is lots of places for their money to go now. Publicans and ourselves harp back to the old days when all we had was drink, the pub etc to entertain ourselves.

Now there is so much more, some events like drinking ban, cost and driving laws,  have pushed us to look at alternatives but we welcomed these changes and have more rounded lifestyles now. There's no denying when people do go to the pub they make the most of it. They can drink more in one night that they did in past where they sat over a few pints a few nights a week.

Pubs are going to be for weekends and events now, places to eat and leave. It's been changing for 30 years and no intervention going to reverse that.

[seafoid]

Especially in rural areas payrises have been disappearing for a good while.
Someone mentioned cheap supermarket alcohol. The supermarkets have also been on a shaky scraw. The money in circulation is a lot lower than it used to be in the countryside. The supermarkets played a zero sum game with the 20% of pubs that closed and won.

[Rossfan]

So if we abolish social media, allow people to smoke/destroy their own and everyone else's lungs, ban off licences, alliw people to have up to 5 pints and still drive.....
Pubs will thrive again???

What about the quill makers though?

[seafoid]

People should have the economic choice to drink in a pub.

[Louther]

People should have the economic choice to drink in a pub.

What?

[Eire90]

more choice of drink in supermarkets and off licenses aswell.

[seafoid]

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2023/09/01/diarmaid-ferriter-traditional-pub-culture-is-raising-a-parting-glass/

Diarmaid Ferriter: Traditional Irish pub culture is raising a parting glass
Irish bars have long been tethering on the edges of community life

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The Clock Pub on Thomas St, Dublin. There have been 457 pub closures since 2019. Photograph: Sam Boal/Rollingnews.ie
Diarmaid Ferriter's face
Diarmaid Ferriter
Fri Sep 1 2023 - 05:00

Donegal councillor Frank McBrearty, whose father Frank owned The Parting Glass bar in Raphoe, this week lamented the demise of the Irish pub. The idea of the parting glass has taken on a new resonance in light of the recent report by the Drinks Industry Group of Ireland that reveals more than a quarter of all pubs in Donegal have closed since 2005 and that in the region of 1,900 pubs across Ireland have shut during that period. Raphoe has only two pubs still open; at one stage it had eight. As McBrearty sees it, the day of "the traditional bar where people came just to drink is gone".

In truth, McBrearty's assessment is just an updated obituary. What's often referred to as the "traditional Irish pub" has been tethering on the edges of Irish community life for decades. As far back as 1969 Donal Connery, an American journalist, suggested: "The pub is a booby-trap for anyone trying to take a true measure of Irish life ... I will admit, as I write this, that it is painful to go against form and portray the Irishman as something other than a glorious drinker and an altogether devil of a fellow. Nonetheless, there are far more homes than pubs in Ireland and it is in the homes that one must look for the Irishman as he is most of the time."

[ Pub closures: 'Each week we were getting new prices. They were doubling and tripling' ]

For all the attention devoted to drink and sociability, there was a dark undercurrent running through the testosterone-filled pub culture. The British anthropologist Hugh Brody observed west of Ireland male drinkers in winter in the 1970s huddled "closely in evident despair ... they exchange silence as if it were words".

But the pub was more than that for much of the 20th century; it served a variety of different social and economic functions; it was where many did their business and formed a focus for community and social and political groupings, with the publicans acting as powerful local figures, sometimes dubbed Ireland's "political landlords". A revealing moment in the run-up to the introduction of the smoking ban in 2004 was when a Munster delegate at a Vintners Federation of Ireland national meeting asked, "who runs this country? We Do!" he answered himself. It was a crass, time-warp blunder.

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That was during an era when, as Cian Molloy pointed out in his 2002 book The Story of the Irish Pub: "You can now order a traditional Irish pub from firms such as the Irish Pub Design and Development Company who will assemble your pub for you ... the company offers six stylistic choices: the cottage pub, the old brewing house, the shop pub, the Gaelic pub, the Victorian pub and the contemporary pub."

In 1990 the Irish consumed 1.7 million cases of wine a year; by 2020 this had risen to more than 10 million cases and 80 per cent of the wine sold at that stage was being consumed at home

While the globalisation that transformed Ireland was gaining speed, the commodification of Irish pub nostalgia involved exporting the remnants of it. Other Celtic Tiger cultural shifts and patterns of social interaction were also relevant; as journalist Carissa Casey observed in 2007: "Economic prosperity has transformed Flann O'Brien's infamous working man and his pint of plain into a harried office drone with a huge mortgage and a long commute. A crisp glass of Chablis in front of the widescreen is now the tipple of choice rather than the famed pint of porter in the cosy confines of a smoky bar."

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When American writer Bill Barich was researching his 2009 book, A pint of plain: Tradition, Change and the Fate of the Irish Pub, he was disappointed. Too many of them he regarded as "museum pieces" or in the business of manufactured nostalgia; why, he wondered, did he find himself amid a small group of Budweiser drinkers watching a soccer match while the barman spent his time sending text messages on his phone?

[ Kitsch Kitchen – Frank McNally on a Salthill institution, O'Connor's Famous Pub ]

There were about 11,000 publicans in Ireland 50 years ago when 75 per cent of all drinking was done in pubs; by 2013 an estimated 43 per cent of standard drinks were consumed at home. Today there are 6,800 pub licences in the Republic amounting to a pub for every 738 people in the country, still a high ratio (there is one pub for every 1,415 people in the UK). But our drinking culture has moved far beyond the horizons of the pub: in 1990 the Irish consumed 1.7 million cases of wine a year; by 2020 this had risen to more than 10 million cases and 80 per cent of the wine sold at that stage was being consumed at home.

Drink-driving laws, the absence of public transport networks in parts of the country, the smoking ban, increased costs, duties and prices, cheaper supermarket options, more focus on food consumption and the Covid crisis have been just some of the nails in the small pub coffin. Earlier this year, the president of the Vintners' Federation of Ireland, John Clendennen, said "the Irish pub is a cultural institution".

Such a claim is looking increasingly hollow.

[Eamonnca1]

Interesting piece. I wonder how big a factor the long commute is. I'd imagine spending 1 to 2 hours a day driving a car would not leave a whole lot of time for the pub. I did that long-distance commute thing for a few years and I was just exhausted all the time. Was very hard to motivate myself to go out, even on the weekends.