Wasted

by Brian O'Connell

  I remember one chap in a rural village and he was only about twelve years of age. I came out of a shop and he threw this thing at me about Manchester and it shook me. I said to myself, ‘This will never leave me.’ I can still get it at times today. When I do go out or go to a drinking scene now, I have to be fairly vigilant and careful who I mix with and where I go. It can still be brought up. Even this year at an occasion I was at, it was brought up.

  Usually, the person will be drunk and they may not mean it, but it’s still there and that is part of it. All I can do is not follow that behaviour today.

  The fact that it was in the national media meant everyone in my locality and throughout Ireland knew I was in treatment for drink. I would have gotten a lot of support on how to handle things. My employers, as well, were a great help to me and I valued it. For my final court case, one of the company directors had broken his leg a few weeks previously and he travelled over to give a reference in court. I got a two-year suspended sentence and paid a fine of nine thousand pounds or thereabouts. The reference from my employer made a big difference.

  A lot of my friends never considered me [as] having a drink problem, because I drank with them. A lot of them would have drank as much as me or more than me. Now, for me to give up drink I’m questioning their drinking. If you look at denial in Ireland people have an acceptance of the amount they drink and that level is very high.

  For anyone trying to stop drinking or taking drugs, it is a lonely spot. I never touched it since and I have to say, coming out of treatment, the aftercare programme was a big help to me. The group were very caring and kind and I got a bit of mothering and that helped me a lot. I was twenty-six when I stopped drinking. The hurling helped and I would have been well known, so I had nothing to hide—it was all out there. I know for a lot of people there is a stigma for people having to tell their story. For me, there is nothing to find out about!

  I currently work as an addiction counsellor at a treatment centre and see many changes in the way addiction is today. You no longer see the guy coming in with drink issues alone. It’s drink and drugs now and that culture has crept in in the last number of years.

  In my time drinking, we hadn’t as many different types of drinks to choose from, either. There was either Smithwicks or bottles of Guinness or maybe a pint of ale. In terms of spirits you might have drank a vodka or brandy. Now you have all those alcopops and flavoured drinks, making them easier to drink and a lot higher in content. Drinks sponsorship has come into sport and as a nation we are painting the picture that drink is okay. The advertising culture is a bit manipulative and they have these small ‘drink sensibly’ logos. That’s all okay for the person who can drink normally, but for the person who can’t it’s a problem. I often hear people say they don’t have the same problems in France with the drinking with young people, who can drink wine and so on. Yet the law in France means there’s no alcohol advertising allowed. Liverpool played a few weeks ago and had to wear black on their jerseys because they are sponsored by Carlsberg. The Heineken Cup in rugby is called the H Cup. As a culture, there is panache in their policy and they are trying to combat it. In Ireland we’re quite the opposite.

  Chapter 6

  Guinness and Late Nights

  Accounting for one in every three draught drinks bought in every pub in Ireland, it’s virtually impossible to explore the theme of drink in Ireland without taking account of the Guinness phenomenon. Symbolically, the logo of the harp, used by Guinness since 1862, was adopted by the Irish government in the 1920s, with the Guinness Harp facing left while the official government version, perhaps ironically, faced the other way. According to practically every travel guide to Ireland, no visit to the country is complete without sampling a pint of the black stuff or taking a visit to the Guinness Storehouse. And where better to hear firsthand about Ireland’s drinking culture than inside the gates of our most renowned brewery? The hallowed home of Guinness for the last 250 years is one of Ireland’s most frequented tourist sites, hosting an average of one million visitors per year—and all this just to see the past and present life of a working brewery! For many drinkers, it is, in essence, the equivalent of Charlie and his impoverished relations getting all-areas access to the Wonka factory. Visitors are often required to book their tickets days and weeks in advance to avoid the lengthy queues at the St James’s Gate site. Like Scotland and haggis, Guinness has become somewhat embedded in the imaging of Ireland, Inc., over the past 100 years and more. Lonely Planet guides can’t get enough of it, with instructions on Guinness etiquette and separate ‘fact boxes’ advising of the medicinal nature of Guinness, and telling would-be visitors that ‘one way to test the quality of a pint of Guinness is by examining the size of the rings of foam left inside your glass (the bigger and thicker the better). Remember: if it’s a good pint, order another one.’ What ever happened to four green fields and céad míle fáiltes?

  I’d never been to the site, or even had a particular taste for Guinness during the good old bad old days of my drinking. Living in Cork, if stout was to be drunk it was more Beamish and Murphy’s, like. When I visited the Guinness Storehouse, on a rainy Thursday in February, stewards marshalled the lines of tourists waiting to be shown inside. What never ceases to amaze me is the sheer scale of the Guinness brewery, its absolutely pivotal place in the heart of the capital city. I’d only seen it from the outside, passing by having arrived in Dublin many times by train at Heuston Station. When Guinness owners Diageo tentatively approached a review of the Guinness operation at the site during the property boom (55 acres in the heart of Dublin was a tempting offload), the plans drew a furious public backlash, ensuring the site remains part of the brewing operation. For now, at least.

  Plans are afoot to divide up the operation, with a new brewery being built in Leixlip, where Guinness heir Desmond Guinness, who still lives in the fairytale-gothic Leixlip Castle, has provided lands. (I was there to interview him once, as Marianne Faithful appeared ghostlike on the landing and Guinness himself whizzed about preparing for the visit of Jerry Hall that evening, unloading crates of wine from the boot of his car!) The Guinness family is rightly proud of their heritage and association with the emergence of the modern Irish state, having set up the Iveagh Trust, an initiative for homeless housing in Dublin, and been, for centuries, the largest taxpayers on the island. The family have also, particularly in the case of Desmond Guinness, been responsible for the re-appreciation of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Irish history and architecture, underlining the cultural and economic contribution Guinness has made to Ireland. The St James’s site itself has been turned into a sophisticated tourist experience, with interactive tours, archives, snazzy restaurants and bars, offering visitors panoramic views of the city while enjoying their complimentary pint. Previous to the present facility, the Guinness Hop Store catered for tourists, but by the year 2000, roughly 340,000 visitors per year were coming through its doors. The current tourist centre was a former derelict building which had blown up in 1987. In 1999, the company put £30 million (sterling) into the building, to act as a showcase site for their brand heritage. Here, the folklore of Ireland and its most synonymous alcoholic drink can be packaged, digitised, and delivered over the course of an afternoon. The majority of visitors come from the UK, Italy, the us and France, with the centre catering for up to 6,000 visitors a day during peak season.

  As an ex-drinker, I’d be lying if I said the prospect of a complimentary pint at the end of the tour wasn’t a tempting offer. It’s times like that when alcohol can often catch you unawares. You might go weeks, months, a year even without thinking of the booze and its seductive qualities. Then BANG! While minding your own business, it comes calling again. In this case, the fact that everyone on the tour was given a glass of Guinness to enjoy underlined the apparent normality of taking a drink. It’s easy to be fooled into thinking that having a sup along with everyone else wouldn’t do any harm. In fact, it would be rude not to. The pint takes on the guis
e of a seductive woman, letting her dress slip off her shoulder, pursing her lips, and whispering enticingly, ‘Come, brush your lips against my rim, don’t worry, it’ll be our little secret.’ I usually answer the calling with thoughts of when I did drink and how distinctly unglamorous the whole thing was and how much of an eejit I made of myself. Like being unable to walk into a shop because of paranoia, or getting into a habit of taking my clothes off and running around gardens naked, while dinner guests looked on utterly bemused. That usually does the trick and helps put any cravings to bed. Counsellors call it rewinding or fast-forwarding the tape—I can’t remember which. All I know is that it works for me.

  I took lunch at the Guinness Storehouse restaurant with two staff from the Corporate Relations team in an effort to find out how the company was performing, what drinking patterns had emerged over the past decade, and what the downturn held in store for the dark stuff. Corporate relations executive Rhonda Evans told me that in 2001, according to Diageo’s figures, 70 per cent of all alcohol in Ireland was sold in pubs. By 2008, that figure was down to 45 per cent, with 55 per cent sold in the off trade, representing a remarkable shift in Irish drinking patterns in a relatively short period of time. Several factors have been identified in accounting for this shift, including the simple fact that people were commuting longer hours to homes many of them had spent big on. Naturally, they want to showcase, enjoy and entertain in their plasma-screened palaces.

  In the 1980s, the culture of going to the pub in the evening after work and before dinner was pretty well established in many urban centres. Now, with longer commutes, it can often be seven or eight in the evening before workers get home to dinner, leaving little time for a sociable drink in between.

  Aside from the setting, people have also increased their repertoire of drinks, so they’re having wine with meals, as well as beer in the bar. The era of males drinking beer and beer alone disappeared, and now they are as likely to sip champagne, cider or gin and tonic. The rise in wine sales over the past decade has also been indicative of how quickly the Irish have taken to the supping in their own domestic environments.

  Rising prices in bars didn’t help either. Of course, ask any publican, and they will tell you it was the smoking ban and drink-driving clampdown wot dunnit.

  ‘During the Celtic Tiger,’ says Rhonda Evans, ‘people were going on more holidays and experiencing different things so the pub wasn’t the sole entertainment experience. Restaurants became hugely popular, and still are. The move to home consumption was hugely dramatic and lots of people in the industry are still taking time to adjust to that.’

  Not so in Diageo, though, whose brands include spirits, draught lagers, beers and stout. Rather than rue the demise of the public house, Diageo was quick to adapt to people’s changing social environments. So, they have bottles of beer, cans of beer, 12-packs, 6-packs, buy three and get a free glass, increased branding in supermarkets, instore promotions, mini-fridges, hats, scarves and headbands . . . the list goes on.

  ‘We put as much effort now into selling our brands in the off trade as we do in pubs,’ says Rhonda Evans. ‘Once we realised the shift in where people were consuming and buying, we moved too. You can’t make people go to the pub if they don’t want to choose.’

  Undoubtedly the growth of the nightclub culture had an impact, with shots and bottles becoming the late-night beverage of choice. There was a period in Ireland in the early 1990s when sales took a dip, especially among younger drinkers. Towards the end of that decade, Ireland was topping binge-drinking leagues in Europe, with the trend peaking in 2001. For now, though, Guinness is back in vogue (and having a huge upsurge in business in Asia and Africa). It has had to adapt quickly and Guinness spent a lot of time and money getting the Guinness can product right, so that the pour quality at home would be the same as in the pub. It’s worked, with over 60 per cent of people drinking Guinness in the pub now buying cans to drink at home also. Those with increasingly hectic work lives, who couldn’t afford to wake up mid-week with a hangover, were also catered for. Guinness mid-strength has been on trial for the past two years. Instead of 4.2 per cent ABV (alcohol by volume), it has a low of 2.8 per cent. The company calls it a ‘slow burner’, but with the government indicating it will give lower duty rates for the product, it looks here to stay.

  Alcohol consumption in Ireland per capita has been declining by between 10 per cent and 20 per cent since 2001. This was a period of almost full employment, of large inward migration and of a general atmosphere of immediacy and excess.

  During the last 12 months of 2008, excise duty on alcohol was down 10 per cent, although due to lower vat levels, cross-border purchases have risen dramatically. Industry insiders point to the fact that one in six households went up to the North between September and December 2008, with the off trade in Northern Ireland increasing by 23 per cent. Most problem drinking in Ireland is now more concentrated during the Thursday-to-Saturday period and it remains to be seen how the downturn will affect drinkers and drinking patterns in the coming decade.

  ——

  If there is one thing Guinness is good at (besides brewing), it’s marketing and advertising. Bar Coca-Cola, the company was one of the first major drinks companies in the 1920s to launch mass advertising campaigns. In recent years, the company has taken flak for its sponsorship campaigns and for launching a ‘drink responsibly’ campaign only after binge-drinking figures had peaked. Many felt that Diageo, like other members of the drinks industry, were only too willing to add to the corporate till in the decades previous and failed to fully engage with the issue of problem drinking in Ireland.

  While the company has always been aware of its citizenship role, from sponsoring charities to good causes, in recent years it has developed more and more its corporate social responsibility role, in response perhaps to a wider understanding of Ireland’s relationship with alcohol. From a Diageo Ireland point of view, this policy has been gathering a huge amount of momentum in the last 10 years, and Diageo point to the fact that they were the first drinks company in Ireland to communicate to consumers the benefits of responsible drinking. So, for example, they launched the ‘Don’t see a Good Night Wasted’ advertising campaign in 2002, followed by the ‘Wake Up Call’ campaign, which saw a guy going through the horrors of the night before while waking up next morning.

  Eventually, perhaps recognising that self-regulation is better than imposed rule, the industry set up an organisation called MEAS, which is an independent charity working to engage in the area of consumer communications through brands such as Drink Aware. ‘The ultimate aim is to change behaviours and attitudes also,’ says spokesperson Jean Doyle. ‘At the moment as an industry we are in the midst of a five-year plan delivering a twenty-million [euro] fund dedicate[d] to the area of awareness and education. Everybody appreciated that the industry needed to focus on this area. There were issues around how certain brands and certain types of things were being promoted. We believe that self-regulation and co-regulation is the best way forward.’

  It’s noticeable that in recent campaigns by MEAS, the focus has shifted from the individual drinker, regretting his/her actions on a night out, to looking at the impact that person has on their direct environment. So the A&E nurse, the shopkeeper and the taxi driver all relay the impact problem drinking is having on their lives. It’s an effort, then, for a collective response by society to a problem which reaches every sector.

  As Jean Doyle notes: ‘At times the industry can be the whipping boy. We should of course be around the table when people are talking about alcohol misuse, but there are other areas of responsibility, be it government policing and enforcement of existing legislation, or parents or the individual. Ultimately there is a strong need for individuals to take responsibility for their own behaviour, and that’s one thing very relevant in the Irish context. If there is a cultural acceptance of getting drunk, and how much you drink and all that macho stuff around it continues to be acceptable, then it is very diff
icult.’

  Despite their endeavours, suspicion remains in some quarters that the drinks industry’s efforts in relation to responsible drinking are mere public relations exercises designed to soften legislation. Advertising continues to be a bugbear of critics of the industry, and certain quarters call for a complete ban on alcohol advertising in Ireland, much like the French model. ‘In relation to advertising we have the most strictly regulated advertising and sponsorship activity,’ says Jean Doyle. ‘The French model hasn’t proven a link between the reduction in misuse and the ban on advertising. However, we are already very highly taxed and [governed] by stringent legislation.’

  New controls mean that drinks companies are not allowed to advertise in any medium where less than 75 per cent of the audience are over 18 (most European norms are 70 per cent).

  But does the use of stringent controls make it right that national sports, such as hurling and Gaelic football, are so heavily identified with brands such as Guinness?

  ‘If you take the GAA, Guinness came in behind hurling at a time when it wasn’t as popular. Everything that was done was considered appropriate by the GAA. We [see] that things like filling sports cups with alcohol is not on, that signage in the stadium is less than twenty-five per cent of any advertising that’s there. The whole thing has been stripped back. As far as we are concerned it is absolutely appropriate if it is done right.’

  Yet the drinks industry spends roughly €70 million in Ireland on advertising each year. Guinness is at the heart of several high-profile sports campaigns, including sponsorship of GAA and rugby.