Guinness and Protestants...

McArmalite

irishgrover wrote: »

in fairness, it's impressive that there are any protestants of any political persuasion left in the 26 counties considering the duel approach of the pyromaniac 'volunteers' of the early free state and the wonderful Catholic Church and it's enlightened Ne Temere policies...

Where many Protestants burned or chased out by the IRA one-up one-down house with no inside toilets or from tenements perhaps? The protestants - and Catholic unionists for that matter - that were burned out of their homes were the good for nothing papasites of the establishment. The IRA's retalitory burning of unionist 'big' houses was only a fraction on the pyromaniac 'volunteers' of the british army around the country.

Anyway, we're going off topic YET again. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

irishgrover

McArmalite wrote: »

Anyway, we're going off topic, again:rolleyes:

why is it that every so often, and yet way too often, McArmalite, takes a piece of a discussion and turns it into little mini "Raa Good, Brits bad", piece of revisionist history b**sh!t, and then stays at the bottom, "we're going off topic again"......?
If ya have such a problem with going off topic, stop dissecting peoples posts out of context in order to find something to blame the Brits about ffs....

McArmalite

irishgrover wrote: »

why is it that every so often, and yet way too often, McArmalite, takes a piece of a discussion and turns it into little mini "Raa Good, Brits bad", piece of revisionist history b**sh!t, and then stays at the bottom, "we're going off topic again"......?
If ya have such a problem with going off topic, stop dissecting peoples posts out of context in order to find something to blame the Brits about ffs....

If people don't stick in an out of context comment, then I wouldn't have to reply to it will I ?? In post #26 you brought in the of topic of " the pyromaniac 'volunteers' of the early free state " I'm only replying to your off topic :rolleyes:

In post #24, extreme unionist getz dragged in " since the formation of the irish free state there has been dozens of murders in west brandun[cork] "

junder

Crumble Froo wrote: »

guinness was originally name something like Guinness' Black Protestant Porter, and the family had originally been staunchly Protestant and anti-Catholic... subsequent generations however, became known for support of Catholic's rights.

i can't talk for employment of workers, but just naming it a 'Protestant' porter, i wouldn't be too shocked to find discrimination in the employment process back in the 18th century.

it was authur guniess's proudest protestant porter and arthur was a stuch supporter of the anti home rule movement even donating money to it hence the ols republican slogan of the 'black hand of guiness around the heart of ireland'

xcrieve

The former head of Guinness from Dublin was on rte radio a few months ago. He has some new state role now, and can't remember his name
anyway, Guinness was streamlined and adjusted to house promotion primarily , he said that guinness up until the sixties or so was all ex-british army types at management level. Then competition from lagers forced a revaluation of the business model, and the manage,ment

CDfm

Lots of firms had policies of not hiring Catholics and that included one Department Store that I know who used to have vacancies no Catholics need apply sign that I was shown by the owner of one such store -years ago.

The positive side of it was that a lot of Protestants did not leave Ireland on Indpendence or pull their capital out of the country.

A bit of economic,social and political apartheid on both sides methinks.

madmac187

Hey peoples, I'm from the south of Ireland and drive an laois reg car, can anyone like give me a list of places not to go in Belfast and places not to go near on the Way to Belfast from Dublin. I was reading another thread and this guy pulled up at a petrol station and didnt see the murals and they nearly kicked the **** out of him. Obviously I don't want that to happen can anyone help. And I will be going to Queens for college the same there any help will be much appreciated:)

Bottle_of_Smoke

madmac187 wrote: »

Hey peoples, I'm from the south of Ireland and drive an laois reg car, can anyone like give me a list of places not to go in Belfast and places not to go near on the Way to Belfast from Dublin. I was reading another thread and this guy pulled up at a petrol station and didnt see the murals and they nearly kicked the **** out of him. Obviously I don't want that to happen can anyone help. And I will be going to Queens for college the same there any help will be much appreciated:)

Get the motorway to Belfast. Start a thread in NI/GB colleges or the belfast forum for the rest

TheScribbler

I must confess that I tire of reading blog notices that attract heavily uninformed debate around emotive subjects.

When viewing history it is always important to review issues from a contemporary viewpoint and not just the way things are viewed today. What seems to have evolved in this discussion is an assumption or assertion that Arthur Guinness was a bigot and anti Catholic. I don't know if he was or not. I prefer to judge the actions of people rather than what may be said about them. The simple truth is that he was an Anglo Irish entrepreneur from Celbridge (not Portadown) who built a significant export business that employed 'Irish' people and generated wealth and jobs in Ireland, the legacy of which is still with us.

Classifying people in terms of their religious affiliation is narrow and demeaning as it conscioulsy seeks to place people as being 'one of us' or 'one of them.' It is utterly counter productive and offensive. It is also offensive to many ordinary Irish people to view them wholly as unionists or nationalists.

We need to grow up a little and move on. Have the last 30 years taught us nothing about the need for pluralism?

Snickers Man

blinding wrote: »

It was the Catholic workers that made the Guinness taste so good;)

Maybe. But the Protestants of Bushmills make the best whiskey.

TheScribbler

Nice one

MarchDub

TheScribbler wrote: »

I must confess that I tire of reading blog notices that attract heavily uninformed debate around emotive subjects...

The simple truth is that he was an Anglo Irish entrepreneur from Celbridge (not Portadown) who built a significant export business that employed 'Irish' people and generated wealth and jobs in Ireland, the legacy of which is still with us.

Guinness was well known around Dublin amongst my own family in the late nineteenth and early to mid twentieth century who worked for them as being good employers, paid well but with the proviso that Catholics were not going to make management. I think it was the 1960s before a Catholic was in management there.

But the Guinness family were blatantly and openly anti-nationalist. One of them spoke out against the 1916 leaders in the House of Commons in support of the executions. As for goodwill or loyalty to their Irish employees evidence suggest there was little of this. Most tellingly, after the Dail passed the "Control of Manufacturers Act" of 1932 they moved quite a lot of production out of Ireland to London and even more significantly moved their corporate Headquarters to London to avoid Irish taxation.

From the 1930s the Guinness Brewery in Park Royal London,[opened around 1937] made all the Guinness stout for the whole of the UK. Not Dublin.

Personally I think it a disgrace the way the Irish Tourist Board has allowed the Guinness logo to become the emblem of Ireland. I say this not because of their past hiring practices - or political leanings- but because it has fed into the worst stereotype of the Irish. But when has the Irish Tourist Board ever cared about this?

pjproby

its a bit more complicated than that surely.In 1932 DeValera stopped the payment of land annuities to the UK. In retaliation Britain imposed duty on our exports and Dev retaliated in kind. As I understand it Guinness opened in London to avoid threatened extra duty on their Irish exports.
As you know the London facility was closed and production transferred back to Dublin in the 2005.

MarchDub

pjproby wrote: »

its a bit more complicated than that surely.In 1932 DeValera stopped the payment of land annuities to the UK. In retaliation Britain imposed duty on our exports and Dev retaliated in kind. As I understand it Guinness opened in London to avoid threatened extra duty on their Irish exports.
As you know the London facility was closed and production transferred back to Dublin in the 2005.

The point I was making - complicated or not - is that Guinness have somehow managed to convince the world [Ireland included] that they are the quintessential "Irish" company when in fact they have made decisions in their own economic interests and not in the interest of the Irish or Ireland. Fine, that's business, but call it what it is. Now they put themselves forward as the chief emblem of Ireland? Nonsense.

Harland and Wolff threatened to do precisely the same thing in 1912 at the passage of the Home Rule bill and they are pilloried for it. They checked out land in Merseyside in the event of Home Rule becoming law. I put this in the same class with Guinness.

Not wearing a Guinness T-shirt. Ever.

pjproby

Perhaps you could define "quintessential Irish"-a fairly monumental task I imagine.

donaghs

McArmalite wrote: »

Where many Protestants burned or chased out by the IRA one-up one-down house with no inside toilets or from tenements perhaps? The protestants - and Catholic unionists for that matter - that were burned out of their homes were the good for nothing papasites of the establishment. The IRA's retalitory burning of unionist 'big' houses was only a fraction on the pyromaniac 'volunteers' of the british army around the country.

Anyway, we're going off topic YET again. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

Sorry for the delayed reaction but you could hardly call Horace Plunkett a "good for nothing parasite of the the establishment"!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_Plunkett
He did a lot of great work to improve quality of life in Ireland, with real concrete achievements that out-lived him. But that wasn't enough to save his house from anti-treaty IRA destruction.

Seanchai

Some extremely interesting posts here. The entire thread emerged when I did a Google for "Guinness Black Protestant Porter", where it is mentioned here.

With its record of extraordinary anti-Catholic sectarianism, hostility to Irish independence, support for the blackest and most sectarian elements of British loyalism in Ireland and the fact that it remains explicitly a British company, the Guinness marketing department has done an absolutely fúcking amazing job convincing people that it is the embodiment of Irishness.

Cormac Ó Gráda's superb Irish Times article in 2009 about how recently it is since Guinness was virtually unknown in many parts of Ireland further substantiates this real history of the Guinness corporation and highlights the myths of its Irishness:

Real story of 250-year quest for the perfect pint

Seanchai

getz wrote: »

discrimination as a word did not exist at the turn of the 20th century

It would have taken you 20 seconds to search for "discrimination" and "etymology", where you would have come across this:

'1640s, "the making of distinctions," from L.L. discriminationem (nom. discriminatio), noun of action from pp. stem of discriminare (see discriminate).'

Instead, you opted to say something patently stupid because a simple check is evidently too much for your intellect or prejudices.

getz wrote: »

but you are wasting your time trying to explain this to the bigots they will always look for a hidden agenda

Quite.

LordSutch

Seanchai wrote: »

With its record of extraordinary anti-Catholic sectarianism, hostility to Irish independence, support for the blackest and most sectarian elements of British loyalism in Ireland and the fact that it remains explicitly a British company, the Guinness marketing department has done an absolutely fúcking amazing job convincing people that it is the embodiment of Irishness.

Question is dear boy, would you allow yourself to have a pint of the black stuff yourself?

Judgement Day

Seanchai wrote: »

Some extremely interesting posts here. The entire thread emerged when I did a Google for "Guinness Black Protestant Porter", where it is mentioned here.

With its record of extraordinary anti-Catholic sectarianism, hostility to Irish independence, support for the blackest and most sectarian elements of British loyalism in Ireland and the fact that it remains explicitly a British company, the Guinness marketing department has done an absolutely fúcking amazing job convincing people that it is the embodiment of Irishness.

Cormac Ó Gráda's superb Irish Times article in 2009 about how recently it is since Guinness was virtually unknown in many parts of Ireland further substantiates this real history of the Guinness corporation and highlights the myths of its Irishness:

Real story of 250-year quest for the perfect pint

Is that why virtually every little pub in the country used to bottle its own Guinness? Whilst there were plenty of smaller breweries, Guinness was available countrywide - at least that's my experience from years of collecting breweriana. Also, in the days before it merged with Grand Metropolitan to form Diageo the Guinness Company and family were well known benefactors to Ireland (St.Stephen's Green and Iveagh House are two gifts that come to mind) but don't let that get in the way of a good rant. Incidentally, your link is useless to those of us who can't afford to sign up with the 'paper of record'.

Judgement Day

LordSutch wrote: »

Question is dear boy, would you allow yourself to have a pint of the black stuff yourself?

I doubt he takes a drink - like his mate Gerry.

Peregrinus

My father worked in Guinesses from 1948 onwards. He was among the first Catholics to be appointed to a management position in the 1960s. That's how it was.

I remember him telling me how in 1969, when the moon landings took place, he was invited into the senior management common room (the only place in the brewery with a television) to watch. He described his sense that the world was changing - not so much because there was a man on the moon, but because there was a Catholic in the senior management common room in Guiness's!

As he describes it, the Guinness policy of recruiting people from a certain background was regarded in the 1960s as unsustainable - everyone knew change was inevitable. But it was seen not so much as discriminatory as hopelessly old-fashioned.

Discrimination didn't die in 1969. It was, of course, many more years before a woman was appointed to management.

gobnaitolunacy

I dunno. I prefer a pint of controversy free Murphy's.

nuac

I agree with Donaghs.

Bank of ireland, Ulster Bank, Irish times, most insurance companies favoured Church of Ireland people for jobs up to c 40/50 years ago.

Hard to blame them really

pedroeibar1

There is no doubt that up to the 1960’s or so, several employers (including Guinness, a few department stores and most insurers) favoured their co-religionists. They were ‘pro-Protestant’ rather than ‘anti-Catholic’ which is a nuance that is beyond some here. It was a question of jobs for ‘their own’ as their economic and religious survival was under threat, from the time of ‘Ne Temere’ to the rabidly nationalistic policies of successive governments, where every Protestant was automatically classified as a ‘West Brit’ and a Catholic was given a job in preference. Those of you who don’t know of it, read about the 1931 Papal encyclical Quadragesima Anno, proof of the influence the Catholic Church had over Irish governments up to the Noel Browne affair.. Most GAAmen would have been horrified to learn that Sam Maguire (he of cup fame) was a Protestant, and one of that Assoc’s founders (St. John MacCarthy) was the rubgy-playing son of an RIC Inspector & RM.

Guinness was a commercial success because it was the first brewery to consistently provide timely delivery of a quality product at a price that allowed the local publicans a reasonable profit margin. They were geared up for mass production, unlike the smaller brewers around the country. Whatever the religion, Guinness was a fantastic employer and really looked after its employees and their families. The anti-Guinness bigots should contrast with the employment policies of William Martin Murphy, who was an Irish Catholic from Bantry.

One of the first Irish insurers, Church & General, was founded earlier to insure churches and schools; the first major Irish insurer was Insurance Corporation of Ireland, founded by the State to prevent large amounts of premium going overseas; its creation also was linked to a marine industry with the establishment of Irish Shipping Ltd. ICI gave precedence to employing Catholics, a few of whom thought they knew it all and brought it to the wall in 1985. (A feat repeated by another Irish Guy, Joe Moore who did the same to the PMPA insurance company and as Quinn has done more recently to his eponymous insurer.) The Irish Catholics have some track record in that industry!

Nuac - Bank of Ireland Like AIB did not come into being until the 1960’s, and possibly was more ‘Catholic’ than the group of banks that constituted AIB – two of which were the Provincial and the Royal, decidedly more ‘Protestant’ I believe.

Peregrinus

pedroeibar1 wrote: »

Nuac - Bank of Ireland Like AIB did not come into being until the 1960’s, and possibly was more ‘Catholic’ than the group of banks that constituted AIB – two of which were the Provincial and the Royal, decidedly more ‘Protestant’ I believe.

Nitpick: Bank of Ireland came into being in 1782 or thereabouts. For most of its existence it was very much an establishment bank, with a strongly Protestant board and senior management. It the 1960s it acquired the National Bank, which was Catholic and Nationalist in character (established by Dan O'Connell, no less) and the Hibernian Bank.

The bank mergers of the 1960s deliberately brought together banks with different traditions, characters and social connections. It was seen that having such characters was a commercial drawback.

pedroeibar1

Peregrinus wrote: »

Nitpick: Bank of Ireland came into being in 1782 or thereabouts. For most of its existence it was very much an establishment bank, with a strongly Protestant board and senior management. It the 1960s it acquired the National Bank, which was Catholic and Nationalist in character (established by Dan O'Connell, no less) and the Hibernian Bank. ...........

Quite, but I’m not going to get into an argument over which bank was more ‘Protestant’ than the other.:p:D There were some great characters in the banks in those days. As a child I remember a manager of BoI College Green who came to work in tweeds, particularly during the shooting season and was known by all as ‘The Squire’. He used to distribute braces of pheasant to favoured customers. In the expansion to England in the post amalgamation era an ability to drink was a prerequisite.

The ‘Royal’ (part of AIB since the amalgamations of the ‘60’s) goes back to 1797, when Thomas Lighton set it up at 78 Fleet St, then moving it to 4 Foster Place. Lighton’s home was MervilleHouse in Dundrum which in a curious coincidence once belonged to the Foster family; Foster was Speaker of the House of Commons, hence the renaming of Turnstile Alley to Foster Place.
Bank of Ireland took up position in the building on Dame Street in 1808, so the Royal predates it to that city location. Lighton made his stash in India, with the East India Company, and along with his c/o, a General Matthews, was captured by a hostile prince. Lighton escaped and disguised as a native smuggled home ‘jewels and property to an immense amount’ belonging to the two of them. He was rewarded by the General and also by his wife, who gave him £20k.

A partner of Lighton from the Foster Place date was Robert Shaw of Bushy Park; Shaw Street off Townsend St. is named after him. He was Comptroller of the Irish Post Office, a director of the Bank of Ireland until his death in 1796, and an elder brother of George Bernard Shaw’s direct ancestor.

Dan O'Connell was very active in business in that era, he also was the founder of the Gas Company.

(Lighton/Royal Bank details from ‘A History of The Royal Bank of Ireland’ , by Kenneth Milne. FSL Lyons wrote the foreword. Published 1964 by Allen Figgis)