Wasted (19 page)

A
ccounting 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.

——

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.