High prices – and not the smoking ban – may have something to do with the decline of the Irish pub, writes ANN MARIE HOURIHANE
IT IS widely assumed that the smoking ban – five years old last week – ruined the Irish pub. Publicans themselves do not altogether hold with this view. Andrew Durkin, a publican in Ballaghaderreen, Co Roscommon, told The Irish Timeslast week: "The smoking ban was just another nail in the coffin. People's habits have changed to a great extent."
Mmmm. I don’t suppose paying €10.40 for a pint of Heineken and a small bottle of Miller would have anything to do with it? Prices are not mentioned by publicans in any discussion on the decline of the Irish pub, no matter how penetrating. People’s habits may have changed, but the habits of publicans have not. That modest order of drinks was purchased twice, in two pubs in Baggot Street, Dublin. That’s prosperous Baggot Street, at the centre of Dublin’s white-collar drinking culture. Stiff with lawyers, accountants and journalists, Baggot Street is – or used to be. Baggot Street, where during the boom the pubs became huge echoing barns with a thin veneer of chic.
As the Heineken and the Miller were consumed, two parties of foreign visitors, who could have been tourists or people over on a business trip, were turned away from one of the echoing bars when straight-faced staff said: “We’re closing now.” Through the large windows the thin veneer of paying customers could watch endless taxis ticking by, empty of passengers.
It is interesting that while so many pubs spent hundreds of thousands, not to say millions, of euro on transforming premises which once provided no greater in-house entertainment than a tank of permanently endangered tropical fish, they never lowered their prices and have not done so during the downturn. And that their staff still act as if drinking, in Dublin at least, is a war, with the ravening hordes permanently trying to rush the bar.
It is true that your traditional Irish pub thrived in the days before the spa, the box-set of posh television programmes, the city break and the astronomical mortgages on first homes; all of a sudden there were so many other things to do. But it is also true that the traditional Irish pub was a series of enclosed spaces, long on bars and short on windows. Somewhere in the past 20 years the Irish pub went from being a shelter to being an arena. When an arena is empty it really feels empty.
As they will not discuss prices – and last week a Terenure pub charged €10 for two small bottles of cider – perhaps publicans might like to consider the proposition that the decline of the Irish pub started with the mezzanine. More than a decade ago quite modest, unfashionable pubs started inserting different levels into what would soon be called their retail space, until they seemed to consist mainly of varnished bannisters. It is a day’s work to get to the lavatories, as you work your way from the bare brick walls of lowest bar up the dark wooden staircase to the middle bar and finally up to the top floor, where the girls once liked to drink, and you find the final set of stairs, to the ladies.
These middle-market pubs still do quite well, I think, with their piped music and their televisions on every level. They aren’t the palatial pubs which are to be found in the suburbs of the dormitory towns, the acres of pub which come with the restaurant and the water feature attached. And they have no pretensions to smartness.
However, the mezzanine idea soon caught on with the city pubs. Soon they were not serving their customers so much as stacking them. The noise levels were unbelievable. It is a tribute to the steadfastness of men and women that they still managed to pick each other up in these places, because the din rendered inaudible those seven words guaranteed to stir an Irish woman’s heart: “So, do you drink here every Friday?”
Presumably the couples who first met like this are now at home together, watching the box-set of The Wire, although not all of that series is audible either.
Even in the good times, the publicans hit an economic problem which stretched over several generations. The young couples couldn’t afford to drink in pubs, or lived in houses on the outskirts of everything, several miles from what once would have been their local. Couples with children went for a meal at the weekend, bypassing the pub altogether. Single people met their friends for dinner. Older people were off golfing in Portugal, and often bought houses there. Even in the countryside the day-time trade in pubs collapsed.
There is no sign that the publicans want any of us back, except to eat lunch every now and then. The people who are the mainstay of the pub trade now are the retired, who like to socialise with their neighbours, and, presumably, the young drinkers who are out hunting for each other. The rest of us are entering our second decade of not going to the Irish pub. If they want us back they’re going to have to let us know.