WILD GEESE: Tiarnán Ó hAimhirgín, Sales and sitribution director SABMiller: Plzenský Prazdroj, Prague
‘THIS IS beer paradise,” says Tiarnán Ó hAimhirgín of his adopted home, Prague. With the Czechs being the highest consumers of beer in the world and the Dubliner the sales and distribution director of Plzenský Prazdroj, the largest brewery in the country, he’s in heaven all right.
Graduating with a degree in German and business from Queen’s University in 1994, Ó hAimhirgín hit the job market when unemployment was running at 14.5 per cent. A shrewd choice made while still at school to focus on German, however, broadened his horizons and has proved pivotal to his career trajectory.
“When I was in school, I took part in an EU project and saw that Ireland did twice as much trade with Germany than it did with France – yet nobody was really studying German,” he says. “I thought, that sounds like an opportunity.”
After Queen’s, Ó hAimhirgín’s language skills enabled him to dodge the dole queues and, through Ibec’s European Orientation Programme for graduates, he landed his first job with a music promoter based in Germany.
“We had a contract with Guinness to bring Irish musicians over to liven up the Irish pubs,” he says. “I was booking Irish bands, organising tour itineraries – trying to rescue them when their cars broke down, or bail them out of trouble with the authorities,” he recalls of what he agrees was a dream job for a young man.
The year spent at the coalface of Germany’s pub scene brought him to the attention of Guinness, with whom he spent four years as an area sales manager in Hamburg. The port city was a test bed for the company’s advertising and Ó hAimhirgín’s challenge was to break brands like Guinness and Smithwicks (branded Kilkenny in Germany because its easier to pronounce) out of the Irish pub scene and into the mainstream. He describes trying to sell Harp to the Germans, however, as like “bringing coals to Newcastle”.
From area sales manager, Ó hAimhirgín became Guinness’s national business development manager and, when Guinness became Diageo in 1997, his stable of brands grew to include Baileys, Johnnie Walker, Smirnoff and Gordon’s. “We moved from selling into pubs to cocktail bars and top-class hotels, so it was a different kind of customer.”
He says the German way of doing business bears out some of the clichés. “They are extremely efficient and punctual and they can be at times rigid and bureaucratic”. However he says Diageo’s own culture was a buffer, being “less formal and more dynamic”.
After 10 years with Guinness in Germany, Ó hAimhirgín got itchy feet. “I thought, am I going to be someone who just knows all about the German drinks industry, or do I want to spread my wings a bit?”
After completing an MBA, he accepted a trade marketing role with South African brewer SABMiller plc, the company behind such brands as Grolsch, Miller, Peroni Nastro Azzurro and Pilsner Urquell. In 2005, the Dubliner found himself based in Budapest overseeing beer sales in Russia, Poland, Slovakia, Italy and Romania.
After a two-year stint, SABMiller decided to make use of his German market expertise and posted him to Cologne as managing director of Pilsner Urquell, where he introduced the Peroni and Grolsch brands to Germany.
Now stationed in Prague as sales and distribution director of SABMiller’s brewing business, Plzenský Prazdroj, the 38-year-old last year oversaw sales of 9.9 million hectolitres of beer and exports to more than 50 countries.
“The Czechs drink the most beer in the world per capita, 50 per cent more than anywhere else and every second beer sold here is from our company,” says Ó hAimhirgín.
“For a person who has spent his working life selling beer, this is a real privilege – it’s beer paradise.”
Living abroad since 1995, Ó hAimhirgín says he completely missed the Celtic Tiger, although on trips home he says that “better roads, new cars, increased self-confidence and greater expectations” were the things he noticed most.
Having represented Ireland at swimming at junior international level, travelling to the UK to train in 50m pools, the opening of such pools in Limerick and Dublin was another indicator of Ireland’s burgeoning wealth.
With a wife from St Petersburg (who he met in an Irish pub in Düsseldorf) and three children who speak Russian, German and English, he says home now “is wherever my family is”.
To graduates who feel they have to travel long haul to the English-speaking US, Canada and Australia, he reminds them of opportunities closer to home.
“The EU is all about the free movement of goods and labour – Germany is booming and central Europe is booming, yet we organise ourselves on a language basis. My advice is don’t be intimidated by language. The people I know have picked up the language quickly while here.
“Irish graduates have a great reputation in Europe. Don’t put blinkers on just because of language,” he says.
