Pubs of Ireland (No More)

Pubs should get rid of Sky Sports etc. Use the savings to lower the price of a pint.

Everybody has dodgy boxes at home. The days of going out for a feed of pints to watch a match are over.

the elephant in the room not mentioned much is mortgages in the 80s and 90s they were manageable or people got a council house and could spend money on pints 2 nights a week. that money supported loads of jobs in a circular economy, now that money is swalloweed up into a black hole of a dutch bank never to be recycled.

I think the advances in technology helped porn more so than the smoking ban.

But back to the pubs.

In the old days mother's rarely worked, so no childcare costs.

And as a result of mothers not working there was no need for two cars.

Equally there was only one TV and no such thing as devices (including TVs) that incur both a capital cost and often a monthly subscription cost.

There was no fast fashion.

Holidays abroad were rare and more than once a year unheard of.

All of this meant there was money for the pub despite 18% mortgage rates, because you had little other entertainment options for spending on.

Plus we are more health concuious now, so less drink and more spent on gyms, bikes etc

Non-smokers are boring? That's a interesting idea. It's more of a rant than an argument.

Times change, life moves on. Demand for pubs is down in the modern world. Maybe it's time to find a new hobby. Lots of other people have found new hobbies, it seems.

It's hardly other people's fault I'd they don't choose the hobby you enjoy. Maybe the old crowd down the pub are boring and that's why young people find other things that interest them.

This is it. My in-laws were a very normal family. Father was starting his career as a tradesman and mother worked a few hours a week. They talk about 18% interest rates and how thy got through them. There's no way a new tradesman could support a family with the wife doing a few hours minimum wage and pay a mortgage with low interest rates nowadays, let alone high interest rates.

The world is different now. Pubs were a normal part of people's spending because they had the money to spend. Now they're not. Pubs are a luxury for lots of normal people with normal jobs

People still have the money to spend, but they are spending it on other entertainment i.e devices, subscriptions, holidays, lisure activities etc, than the pubs.

Yeah thsts true too. I'm in that bracket. I have a phone and I go on a summer holiday. I also have a second hand car, pay childcare and have a netflix subscription and save for a house. We both work decent jobs and the pub is just an extravagant use of money for us.

I'm having mates around for the six nations next weekend. I'll cook and they'll bring their own booze. Cheap day out and plenty of craic. For me, that's preferable to the pub.

I suspect pubs being closed for best part of two years didn't help.

That's true about a few pubs like that, but the young are drinking less than previous generations overall. If they don't get in the habit of spending time and money in pubs, then the decline in pubs is likely to continue into the future.

Yep, spot on!

And there may not be the money or the customer base to warrant a rural pub diversifying to Craft/Live Music/Food etc in order to distinguish itself.

Another factor is demographics.

Dublin County has grown by approx 180,000 people in the last 10 years - an increase similar to the current populations of Galway & Limerick cities!

So there are more people to keep the numbers up in pubs in the big cities.

I would imagine a lot of rural towns have stagnated or reduced population over the last 10 years.

Less people in the town makes it even harder for pubs or any other business or service to stay viable.

Out in the sticks in the good old days, publicans realised that they couldn't make a living just running a pub, so had a couple of other businesses running from the same property, a shop, a filling station, and sometimes a funeral business. When the owners of those businesses died out, the next generation usually ignored the back up of the other businesses, and struggled with just running the bar.

I live near Listowel, which once upon a time had about 60 bars, that had dropped to about thirty, two or three decades ago, and I think there are a hell of a lot less than that now. There seem to be more hairdressers, barbers, and tanning salons, than pubs now.

We had a pub in the local town here close after Christmas. Over 1k comments on their Facebook post lamenting it's loss. if only a fraction of those commenting actually went in, it may not have closed.

Just goes to show the change in culture and spending habits. Some people would spend as much on coffee per week now as they used to in a pub.