Rarefied taste and affluence have replaced spit and sawdust in our pubs, which are now more valuable for their prime locations than their licence, writes Paul Cullen.
It sustained us through darker times, providing a lifeline of social intercourse when there was little to do and less money to do it with. Its faux leather couches and hard stools were the venue for many a family gathering or furtive tryst, and its warm beer gave succour to many through life's cruel twists.
Then along came the Celtic Tiger, and the first thing it did to the Irish pub was to turn it into a commodity, a flatpack export that claimed to be the distillation of Irishness globally.
Now the Tiger, having gorged on the marketing and tourism potential of the traditional local, has had enough of porter-soaked carpets and elderly drinkers. Small, family-run pubs around the country are closing at the rate of one every day. Developers are eyeing up pub sites, not for their drinks licences but for their prime locations.
Down come the pubs, up go the apartment blocks and in move the residents - and the last thing they want is a new pub operating noisily on the ground floor of their buildings.
Farewell, then, the traditional Irish pub, you did the State some service. The allure of shebeens down boreens is now with O'Leary in the grave. We have money today, and the rarefied tastes that go with affluence, and these not likely to be satisfied in your local spit and sawdust drinks emporium. It's last orders, if not last rites, for your humble offering.
Travel through the land tomorrow night, though, and you'll doubt what I say. Pubs everywhere will be packed with revellers marking the arrival of another year. The beer will be flowing, and so will the cash.
Yet come back a week later and many of these pubs will be empty.
Daytime drinkers are a rarity now, and in many areas pubs get busy only on weekend nights after 10 o'clock.
FOR THESE ARE the best of times, and yet the worst of times for the Irish pub. Consumption of alcohol is near record levels - even if we weren't drinking more individually, the population is bigger and the once significant community of Pioneers is now negligible. We spend three times more than any other EU country relative to income, and also top the table for binge drinking.
Yet while off-licences are multiplying and home drinking is booming, more than 600 pubs, most of them in rural areas, have closed in the past two years. Forty per cent of pubs that come on the market are bought by developers. The pubs that are thriving are those that have diversified into other areas, such as food and night-time entertainment, and often these are owned by conglomerates. They're usually in urban areas with good transport links.
"Pubs have taken a bit of a battering in recent years," says Gerard O'Neill, chief executive of Amárach consulting. "The sector is now going through a fundamental process of change which will result in far fewer pubs, and very different ones." For O'Neill, it is no coincidence that the pub business peaked in 2000, which was also the year when the young population peaked; after all, the 18 to 24-year-olds are the biggest spenders on drink. Since then, the introduction of the euro raised issues about value for money, while the recent abolition of the Groceries Order has promoted below-cost selling of alcohol and widened the gap in prices between pubs and off-licences.
More prominently, the smoking ban introduced in 2004 affected many pubs' businesses, although John Ryan, an auctioneer with CB Richard Ellis Gunne, says that most pubs have bounced back by providing outdoor smoking areas.
For many rural pubs, the advent of random breath testing is the final straw. To add to their difficulties, pub-owners can't even be seen to criticise the development, given the appalling number of road traffic fatalities, many of them involving drink.
COUNTRY SINGER DECLAN Nerney has emerged as a spokesman for the unreconstructed older rural drinker, those most put upon by the drink driving campaigns. "People cannot go out every weekend anymore because of the way society has changed," he claims. "Each new law - the smoking ban, drink-driving tests - has had its negative effect on social life." According to Nerney, the over-55s, whom he credits with paving the way for our present prosperity, are being forgotten about. The marketing types aren't interested in them because they aren't big consumers, the Garda wants only to breathalyse them when driving and, when they do stay at home, there's nothing on the television to suit their homespun tastes.
At least Nerney has come up with an innovative solution for his fans. Every year, he flies three planeloads to Lanzarote for the "Hooley in the Sun", where they can drink, smoke and stay up late to their hearts' content.
What we drink is also changing. The pint of plain is far from being "your only man" these days; sales of Guinness have fallen for seven straight years, and even heavily-advertised lagers such as Budweiser are in decline. Wine is the new religion of the middle-aged drinker, while the youth market has been carved up among a vast array of niche products.
But is it good for us to be doing so much of our drinking at home? Even veteran anti-drink campaigner Dr Mick Loftus says he would prefer to see people drinking in pubs, because of the social aspect.
Dr Loftus believes that while we have lost our sense of shame about drinking, we still don't like to see people drunk.
How times have changed - when Loftus was a reserve on the Mayo GAA team of 1951, it included nine Pioneers. The minor team he played on in 1949 included not a single drinker, even though they were all aged at least 18 years.
Senior counsel Constance Cassidy, the legal authority on the licensing trade, says the loss of rural pubs may be our loss too.
"The small quaint pubs in rural areas are just not getting the business. They were the focus of community life and it's to the detriment of their areas if they close down." Licensing law is an arcane subject, with the first statute dating back to 1635; it sought to place restrictions on the number and running of ale-houses, which had become "receptacles for rebels and other malefactors and harbours for gamesters and other idle, disordered, and unprofitable livers".
Almost 400 years later and we're still trying to control the licensed trade with what Cassidy calls a "prohibitory" regime.
Although there has been some liberalisation, the basic rule remains that you have to extinguish one drinks licence to create another. The market price for a pub licence these days is about €175,000. So a pub licence can be shifted from one part of the country to another but, in addition to this, a pub licence can be extinguished and a new licence for an off-licence created in its place.
In her work, Cassidy says there has been an "explosion" of applications by off-licences. "Pub licences from all around the country are being killed off to create new off-licences. Convenience stores want to be able to sell beer, and their customers want to buy everything under one roof."
The burden of regulation falls heaviest on the small pub. Vintners face a variety of sanctions for licensing, hygiene, smoking, planning, equal status and age infractions, up to and including temporary closure or loss of licence. "You could have 3,000 people at a hotel function, and the presence of one under-age drinker could lead to temporary closure," says Cassidy.
While pubs struggle, membership of the National Association of Off-licences has grown 20 per cent in the past year. "The pubs aren't doing themselves any favours by charging so much," says Richard Barry, an off-licence owner in Rathfarnham, south Co Dublin. "There should be a premium for providing a place in which to drink, but it's too big." Barry says a bottle of Budweiser which costs €1.60 in his shop costs about €5 in a pub. "People have spent a lot of money on their houses in recent years and they want to spend more time in them. So along with the plasma screen television and the decking they want to drink alcohol at home." Barry also notes that while younger consumers want cheap drink, older customers are cutting back on quantity and looking for quality in their alcohol consumption. Speciality beers and fine wines are in, label beers and cheap plonk are out.
IS IT TOO soon to talk of a new spirit of temperance? Maybe so, but Cassidy says a big change is coming. "The old days of people saying 'one for the road' are gone. Long lunches with drink are disappearing. People are working harder, they rely on their cars and they're paranoid about breath testing. Given a choice between the two, they'll put the car before the drink."
Cassidy's contention that people are "paranoid" about breath testing is borne out by a recent Road Safety Authority survey. This found that 87 per cent of people believed drinking and driving (which is legal in small amounts) was extremely shameful, barely less than the proportion for child abuse (96 per cent) and drug dealing (93 per cent), which are both definitely illegal.
In some pubs, food now accounts for 40 per cent of turnover.
O'Neill says pubs have been slow to grasp the potential of wine, but those that have have reaped the rewards. By accident rather than design, he says, we may end up with the cafe-bar phenomenon favoured by the Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell.
"Young people want to socialise in a range of outlets, not just pubs. People will still want to go out, but pubs, while they will still form part of the drinking equation, will see their share of the market decline."
Round numbers
Number of pub licences in Ireland:8,415
Number of off-licences:3,456
Off-licence salesaccounted for 19.1 per cent of expenditure on alcohol in 1991, and 29.2 per cent in 2003
Alcohol consumption per capitain 2004 was 3 per cent lower than in 2000
Alcoholic beverage consumption was valued at €6.079 millionin 2003
Source: Drinks Industry Group of Ireland