Should the State carry the cost of driving people to and from the pub? It's a question that widens the urban-rural abyss, writes Kathy Sheridan
The urban-rural divide rarely seemed as stark as it did this week, nor an election so near. Within 24 hours of a notion by Fianna Fáil backbencher and teetotaller Joe Callanan to establish a Nitelink-type bus service to bring rural dwellers to and from the local pub, fairy godmother Éamon Ó Cuiv, Minister for Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, had flashed his magic wand and decreed that country folk shall go to the pub. The elements of surprise and speed were startling, not least to the administrators of the Rural Transport Initiative, the would-be trustees of the new scheme.
But what's not to like about a stroke of rural magic? A feasible, low-cost plan to retrieve the social lives of thousands of isolated individuals while, incidentally, reviving some ailing rural pubs (closing at a rate of nearly one a day in the last two years), could hardly encounter serious opposition, could it? That is to reckon without the abyss - usually adroitly camouflaged - that exists between urban and deep rural Ireland and, more specifically, between the lucky folk with a network of family and friends living nearby to share the designated driver role, or who can choose to hop on the heavily subsidised, €1 billion Luas, Dart or bus systems, and an isolated old bachelor living five miles from his only social outlet, the pub.
The heads of Dublin-centric pundits were still spinning on Wednesday night. On the Tonight With Vincent Browne radio show, one pronounced the plan to be a "gobsmackingly Father Ted-ish initiative . . . to fund [ the drinking] of mythical aul' fellas . . ."
All week, questions were framed to suggest that lonely old bachelors in rural Ireland were an invention of the Licensed Vintners Association; or that the new scheme was "forcing the taxpayer to fund a transport system designed to enable people to get drunk" in a country already catastrophically in thrall to alcohol, or that it was the country dwellers' own fault for living in far-flung old kips anyway. The usual antipathy towards publicans in general didn't help, pricked by fatuous calls from the vintners for compensation packages to subsidise the trade following the smoking ban and the introduction of random breath testing.
While South Tipperary county councillor Michael Fitzgerald got it in the neck (and lost the Fine Gael whip) in November for arguing that there was a big difference between an old boy chugging home after three or four pints and crazed boy racers scorching "doughnuts" into public roads at 3am, he was not the first to suggest that there should be some sensitivity to a rural culture.
Last June, Labour Senator Derek McDowell, speaking on the introduction of the Bill to include random breath testing, had no problem, he said, with such a test in Dublin where there was a decent public transport system, but warned of "a cold wind" for fellow politicians in rural areas "if the measure was not enforced in a way that was reasonably sensitive to social life in rural areas".
DR MARY UPTON, Labour's spokeswoman on agriculture, who produced a package of proposals to encourage the survival of rural businesses in the autumn, was noble enough to welcome Ó Cuiv's proposal. "There is no excuse for drink-driving. If you're over the limit, you're over the limit. All that talk about special concessions for rural areas is just hype," she says. "But I know rural Ireland and I know about isolation there and how people can be three miles from the local pub and from Mass and how that is probably their only social outing . . . Yes, this proposal is a knee-jerk reaction but it's an initiative that should be pursued and debated and qualified."
But is it just a pre-election, State-sponsored device for delivering people to a venue for the purpose of getting drunk? "There's a difference between being over the limit when it's not wise or safe to drive, and getting drunk," says Upton. "We would be delivering them to a social outing, probably their only outlet. They won't be starting a row, or shouting and roaring at three in the morning, or being disruptive or engaging in that kind of anti- social behaviour. They'll play a game of cards and have a chat . . ."
Despite the Donnybrook doubters, the men in Gerry Finnerty's pub and shop in Tubber on Thursday night were no myths. This is the heartland of Fianna Fáil TD Joe Callanan's East Galway constituency and the only alternative to Finnerty's for at least six miles is the pub next door. "This is paper evening - the local papers come out on a Thursday, so you'll have them coming in for them and having a drink afterwards," says Finnerty.
Jerry Roche, a 69-year-old bachelor farmer - "ah, sure doing a bit" - is leaning over the counter, sipping on one of the three or four whiskies he drinks on an average night. He lives about six miles away, and comes out three nights a week if he can, arriving at 9 or 10pm and going home around midnight. Recently he found himself staying home "a lot more. You'd not be here to get drunk, ah not at all. Havin' too much to drink is a dead loss. It's just to get out, meet the crowd. It's for the craic," he says with a laugh, then says seriously: "My life'd be worth nothing to me if I couldn't go to the pub."
He is getting out more now because Finnerty has spent around €10,000 on buying, taxing and insuring an old eight-seater bus, to run customers to and from the pub. With a day job as manager of the livestock mart in Gort, he is well placed to assess the radical changes underway in rural Ireland.
"These men are not a myth. You have to live in the country to understand it," he says, glancing around at his clientele. "If I was to drive you to some of these homes tonight, you wouldn't believe how backward they could be. They're very, very isolated and if they don't get out to meet people . . . I'm not saying they're alcoholics; it's a social outing, meeting people similar to themselves, people who are alone, or widowed. We have music on Saturday nights, step dancing classes on Wednesday, and card games on Friday nights. They all attract a different crowd but that's the night those people look forward to and some of them even live for . . . It's their focal point. Socialising in pubs is an old tradition. Even in times of poverty, the takings from pubs were upping the revenue in every budget."
PADDY HAYES (58), who lives five miles away, says that "only for Gerry" he would not be here. His only option before this was a taxi which cost €30 return. "It's that dear because it has to come from Ennis. Gort is nearer, to be sure, but you won't get a taxi to come from Gort during the week . . . They'll only work the weekend." Even then, another publican points out that a customer who called a taxi last Saturday at 2am was still waiting two hours later.
This almost total dearth of public transport at night is a common phenomenon. Pat Love, co-ordinator of the North Leitrim Men's Group in Manorhamilton, notes that while the town had three or four taxi drivers a few years ago, there is now only one who is prepared to work at night, due to insurance costs, unsocial hours and rows involving drunken youths. In the village of Dowra, the sole taxi operator has moved his service to Carrick-on-Shannon.
Meanwhile, publicans providing door-to-door transport have not chosen the easy option. An average run for Finnerty from his pub in Tubber takes 20 minutes. On a busy night, there could be six or seven of these runs, a significant time investment that leaves "one less hand to clean up," he says. There was a time when a publican just had to douse the lights at closing time and everyone got up and went home, which took around 15 minutes. Now groups waiting for their lift have altered the system. "If this is the way pubs have to go, the whole licensing law will have to be looked at. You can't just leave them standing out in the cold and wet," he says on a night when storms are battering the countryside.
Clearly, as Joe Callanan points out, this is not only about old bachelors. Last year, the North Leitrim Men's Group produced an EU-funded survey of 165 men from the Border counties of Leitrim, Cavan and Fermanagh, ranging in age from 18 to 65, which painted a picture bleakly at odds with Donnybrook perceptions. More than a fifth of them lived alone and 70 per cent had very poor reading skills. Only 2 per cent said their normal mode of transport was public (a reflection on the availability of public transport rather than car ownership, as the author pointed out). Half had some involvement with the GAA, 58 per cent attended a place of worship regularly, but only 15 per cent visited their neighbours. For 77 per cent, the pub was their main or only social outlet, the place they go "to meet people".
"Very few will say that it's about drink," says Pat Love. "It's to meet up, for the story-telling, the darts . . . That's all been taken away."
Love and his group are no sentimentalists about pubs. They have been at pains to try and introduce alternatives, fighting much official indifference with their drop-in centre and day-trips up country, with the help of a minibus provided by the health board. "But if there is no other outlet for him, a man is going to sit at home. What happens if you're sitting at home? You work yourself up to a point where you go on a notorious tear or you end up with mental problems.
"The pub culture could take over too much but that has been dealt with to some extent by [ the contraction in] opening hours and so many pubs closing down. Since about 1990, here in Manorhamilton, the number of pubs has gone down from 16 to nine, and four of those nine wouldn't open till 7pm."
IN ANY EVENT, Love has noticed a more disturbing shift among slightly younger men in recent years. Whereas in 1996/97, when the group was set up, the culture was predominantly centred around alcohol and cigarettes, "now we see 30 per cent of our participants are also dabbling in drugs - just cannabis, I'd say mostly - although all the agencies including the Garda will absolutely deny it."
Another survey in Dingle, Co Kerry, this time of single, older men, found that 23 per cent reported depression or suicidal feelings. The lack of transport and the changing employment and social structures had contributed to feelings of low self-esteem and exclusion. With the passing of such social outlets as the small local creamery, the pub was the main point of social contact, "even for those 15 per cent who recognised that they had a drinking problem".
There can be no question but that the rural pub, with all its flaws, is a vital outlet, the "equivalent of Donnybrook coffee shops", says Joe Callanan. But they do have serious questions to answer. Pat Love says that publicans "have to look at themselves, with the aul' TV blaring above them taking over and some young one behind the bar playing loud music that'll appeal to no-one but herself and not engaging with anyone . . . I'd say if you were to sit a few of our men down and ask them, they'd say that pubs were the most depressing places you could be in. And I'm not looking for blanket country and western music either: that'd kill them with depression altogether".
In many cases, however, serious money has been spent in efforts to upgrade what were smelly old hovels for the most part, even in places that might see only a handful of customers in a night. Passing an A4 sign on a tree, "Funeral this way", we head further up country into Callanan's constituency, into Derrybrien (site of a serious landslide a few years ago) where Mrs Egan has been running her neat little pub and grocery shop, with a single petrol pump and phone box outside, since 1949. "It's not really viable," she says, as we look into a dark, empty lounge at 9.30pm on a Thursday. "It suits us to have it, it's a past-time. Ah, I'd be lost without it."
Further on, in Dominic and Mary O'Connor's of Moyglass, a big welcoming fire burns in the grate of an immaculately clean lounge, to an audience of just Dominic and Mary. The pub has been in the family for 65 years and, 12 years ago, the couple spent €60,000 demolishing the old one and building the new one. "We don't know if we can keep it open," says Dominic, echoing the universal view that people are not only terrified of the night-time breath test but even more so of the one they might encounter en route to work next morning.
"Older men are not going out during the week. Friday and Saturday is it now. Sunday night is gone." Dominic is a full-time plumber, starting at 7.30am, and later opening the pub at 9pm, working with Mary as a team. "If we didn't have the plumbing work, we couldn't continue here."
At Florence McCarthy's pub in Kilbeacleton, what seems to be a crowd is half a dozen pint- drinkers at the bar, swollen by a bunch of GAA lads in to sort out tickets and money for a forthcoming draw. Florence is the third generation here and is kept going mainly by the proceeds of the function room he built next door in 1980. "I don't think I'd survive without the functions, anniversaries and 21st parties."
He is not looking for handouts. Pubs should be providing their own hackney service, he says, and insurance companies should be helping by quoting "reasonable rates", with "maybe a tax break from the Government. Publicans are going to have to do more and more . . ."
Unlike urban publicans, whose hot topic is the squillions on offer from developers, the talk among rural publicans is the rate at which supermarket multiples are snapping up drink licences. Where a pub in the middle of nowhere may be virtually worthless as a going concern, the licence will still fetch around €150,000.
Whatever about the fate of the rural pub, the question is, are rural people entitled to go out and enjoy themselves, to have more than a single glass of wine, or even to get drunk (as is painfully evident on the Nitelink services), just as urban dwellers are able to do, and be transported home courtesy of heavy subsidies from the taxpayer? It seems simple enough. Joe Callanan says it can be localised, customised and funded from the existing Rural Social Scheme (designed to boost small farm incomes) at little cost.
Colm Markey, president of Macra na Feirme, farming's youth wing, has called for a public transport service similar to Nitelink, saying that rural people were disadvantaged in terms of transport, especially late night transport at weekends. "There is no reason in my own county, Louth, why there should not be a circular service running until 3am, past the clubs and pubs and other places of leisure that would service the needs of rural people."