“There seems to be a fundamental lifestyle change going on here,” says Mary Lambkin, professor of marketing at the UCD Quinn school of business and the author of several studies on the drinks industry. “As people got richer and more sophisticated they weren’t prepared to sit in a dirty pub any more. Young people in particular wanted newer, brighter, more modern places to meet in.”
“It’s easy to blame the smoking ban or drink-driving laws, but they’re not the problem,” says Conor Kenny of Conor Kenny Associates, consultants to the pub and hotel trade. “The greatest tragedy about pubs is that they have become irrelevant to a generation.”
Lambkin likens the situation to a shopper returning to the drabness of a local haberdashery after visiting the glitz of a new mall. “Consumers are now well travelled and well educated, and they’re not going to spend their lives watching an auld fella in a cloth cap holding up the bar in a dingy local.”
Altså som vanligt - ikke rygeforbuddet.
...The drinks industry has cited figures from its "on-trade accounts", claiming that the number of these accounts - which include pubs, hotel bars and nightclubs - has fallen from 11,000 in 2001 to 9,500 now. The impression given was of a steady decline, of a business that was slowly dying on its feet.
But why did the drinks industry choose the year 2001 to start the clock? Did the decline not start with the smoking ban, which began in March 2004, or more recently, with the economic downturn? If the industry had counted pubs a year earlier, they would have had a good news story. And if they had chosen a later year, the figures would have been a lot less dramatic.
Every pub in the country is licensed by the Revenue Commissioners to sell alcohol. According to the Revenue Commissioners' annual reports, in 2000 there were some 7,500 pub licences in existence. So if the graph starts in 2000 the good news is that the number of pubs in Ireland has grown by 2,000 in this millennium.
After the peak of 2001 there was a steep fall-off, and by the end of 2002 more than 1,400 pub licences had disappeared from Revenue figures.
So when the Revenue graph on licence numbers is drawn, it is clear that six years ago, at the height of the economic boom, before the smoking ban and in the space of 12 months, the country lost 1,400 pubs, on paper. Yet, despite the plummet, there was little talk of a catastrophe in the pub trade in 2002.
Tip: Hr. Hansen
