Pubs of Ireland (No More)

I'm in a small rural town. Hardly 10% of the size of Tullamore.

Pubs closed include:

Ramada Hotel 3km outside of the town. Now a nursing home.

Hogan Stand - Sold, going to be turned into apartments.

Slaney Hotel - Work just begun to turn it into 10 apartments.

Bridge House - Rumoured to be apartments.

Byrne's - Boarded up.

Kealy's - Knocked down.

Slip Inn - Now flats.

Irish Bar - Derelict. Work started on gutting it and never progressed.

Noeleen Browne's - for sale. Hasn't been open for a year or so.

There's 5 pubs left and three or four of them are on life support. Only open for a few hours every night mostly as a hobby for the owners. They surely can't be making any money.

Back in the early nineties 8 cans would cost me about 10.50, but if i went to the pub i could have 8 pints for around 13.50.

In 2023 i can buy 8 cans for 13 euro, but 8 pints would be at least 40.

I have no idea what happened in the interim, but the death of pubs would seem a fairly obvious eventuality given the price differential.

I would say the introduction of the minimum wage, lower interest rates which created a rake of property entrepreneurs and maybe insurance costs.

€50k for a licence is one of the smaller costs of developing a new pub from scratch.

I can't see many bothering when you consider how many have closed over the last 10 or 15 years anyway.

The customers are just not there any more.

It will just make the pubs even more unviable and lead to more closures. Example- Pub A is already established, the only one left. Along comes pub B with its new lucky bag licence. Pub B won’t be able to sell cheaper than Pub A. Promotions, happy hour etc all illegal. So, in rural areas with dwindling populations and pub goers, let’s say pub A now loses half its clients to pub B, both pubs struggle to make ends meet and close down. Yes, a master move from the fools in Dáil Éireann to further destroy the fabric of rural Ireland

As somebody else said the fifty grand is loose change in the overall cost of starting a pub.

Don't see many spending several hundred thousand on a rural pub. Doubt any bank would back them either.

As mentioned earlier in the very early 90's pints were about 1.50 but cans were about 1, only flagons at 6% for about 3.50 made much sense in saving money drinking at home v. the pub. But also something that is not really mentioned is there was nothing to do at home on a Saturday night, no internet--youtube etc, few people had skysports, so nobody worked all week just to stay at home looking at RTE and not drinking. There is always something to occupy your time looking at these days. Throw in the smoking ban for smokers and the fact you were generally left alone if you had 4-5 pints over 4-5 hours to drive home on quiet country roads then it is a whole different ball game nowadays. Also no mobile phones so it was often the only time you could contact someone and you didn't know who would be in the pubs until you went in so were more likely to chance going out, more pubs also gave more variety- a 3 pub village meant you could move around or escape certain people rather than being stuck in the same one like now if the other 2 have closed.

This is a really good point.

I'd happily sit in on a Saturday and have a few cans going down YouTube rabbit holes watching old matches or music.This wasn't an options years ago when you needed to go out to have some sort of interaction.

I live in a large town in the west of Ireland,in the late 90s there were approximately 50 pubs (now even then that was very high for the population) 5 or 6 of them would have live music Thurs to Sun.There were 3 nightclubs and 3 dedicated off licences

Now there are 17 pubs and no night clubs only off licenses are in petrol stations.

Ah no, is Baggot's gone? Spent 2 days after a wedding in there.

Baggot's Back door wasn't it called?

In the countryside the pub provides a social outlet for the older generation who are not YouTubers etc. I’d see it as a vital service to have in the community for that cohort of people who frequently have lost their partner or are alone. It’s all well and good for the “as long as I’m alright Jack” types, but for some people the pub is the only social space they have.

..

Around here, only one pub shut down. The owners were old, retired and sold the premises and a centra was opened in the building . No loss as it was one of the less charming premises. Aesthetically and in terms of some clientele apparatus.

the greatest loss that I was a semi regular in all be it not local was Oscar Taylor’s in Malahide… food to die for, a gentle comfy ambience, beside the seaside and just outside the genial hustle and bustle of downtown Malahide, that was a loss… a family favourite for decades…the view from the restaurant upstairs was fab. It was comfy but traditional, never modernised but you could eat your dinner off the floor it was that spotless… a real old world charm.

It is bollix the way society has changed in that regard. It wasnt so awful long ago that there was no such thing as commercial childcare. I can imagine chain childcare facilities becoming a thing in the next few years. Jeff Bezos or some other billionaire who will sprinkle formulaic rectangular childcare facilities all over the country, he will run TV adverising campaigns for them. They'll rely heavily on automation. Robot Hoovers zipping about with arms that also pick up unused toys and fukks them into a box, teletubby-like bots keeping the children occupied and one poor human begrudgingly paid minimum wage to sit in a corner and change nappies all day.

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.