Around this time last year, I read an announcement in the media that caught my eye and annoyed me: The pub once known as Becky Morgans on Grand Canal Street Lower in Dublin was to be re-named “The Storyteller”. The reason for my annoyance was that while I hadn’t set foot in the place in fifteen years or more, it had once been “my” pub for a couple of years in the mid 2000’s when I was working around the corner, and it was the place we’d gather at lunchtime (the food, in those days, was excellent) and in the evening after work. To this day, it remains the only hospitality venue that could ever honestly have claimed me as a “regular”.
Over the last few years, the Irish pub as an institution has spiralled into what appears to be terminal decline: almost 2,000 pubs have closed in the Republic since 2005, never to re-open their doors. At the present rate, about 150 are closing permanently every year.
If you want to blame the Government for this, then there are doubtless a hundred things you could point to: Taxes, increased minimum wages, the covid-19 pandemic, and the extortionate price of alcohol which is mainly a result of excise duties. But Government policy alone does not, I think, explain it.
A study last year by the ESRI found that over a third of young Irish people now report having gotten to know somebody in person that they first met online. While there are no precise figures, anecdotal evidence overwhelmingly suggests that a substantial percentage of romantic relationships now commence through online dating apps, rather than meeting somebody on a night out. In both the platonic and the romantic sense, then, the imperative for people to “get out there” has substantially reduced, especially when the internet is a cheaper option.
Add to that other factors: The range and volume of entertainment available to us in our homes has absolutely skyrocketed over the past two decades, with the emergence of online streaming services meaning that the choice is no longer “the pub versus the Late Late Show”, and means that the pub must compete with a vastly larger range of entertainment. That other old USP of the pub – live satellite sports – has been eroded as well by the rise in both the legal and illegal use of internet streaming to allow people to watch Liverpool or Arsenal in the comfort of their own homes.
Pubs, like other businesses, are at the mercy of the laws of supply and demand – and the bottom line is that over the last two decades, demand for their services has fallen, which is why so many of them are struggling to survive. This does not mean, however, that the pub is destined for extinction, or that, as Una Mullally suggested in the Irish Times yesterday, the Irish Pub deserves some form of protection from the United Nations. They’re a cultural asset, she says. She may be right, but it’s also true that protected cultural assets tend to be protected precisely and only because they would not survive if they depended on the public’s appreciation of them. This is as true of local theatres and museums and libraries, all of which get state funding, as it is of pubs. The problem is that saving pubs would be many times more expensive, and we’d all end up paying for it.
All that the ongoing decline means, in reality, is that those pubs that survive will generally be those that have adapted best to a changing environment by offering the public products and environs that the public are willing to pay for. In many cases, this has resulted in an improvement: In your correspondent’s experience, the overall quality of food, for example, in Irish pubs has improved dramatically since the early noughties. Those pubs that offer warm and clean and spacious smoking areas do better than those that do not. Those that have struggled have tended to be those that have failed to adapt and change to the changing demands of the public. Unfortunately, this has been especially difficult for rural pubs, who have been a victim of something else: the continuing migration of young people to urban centres.
What, exactly, can Government be asked to do about all of this? Yes, there are some things that Government could do in the short term to provide financial support, but to what ultimate end? If the problem is – as the figures suggest – falling demand for traditional Irish pubs then a few measures to support those pubs financially will only slow the process, rather than reverse it. It’s true, and disgraceful, that the covid lockdowns prematurely finished many businesses off. But it’s also true that many of them were in terminal decline already.
Last week, I wrote about the folly of opening a “community hotel” in Roscrea, where it was proposed that a hotel would be fully funded and run, essentially, by the Government for the benefit of the local people. The harsh truth there is that if a hotel serving the local people was a profitable or viable commercial venture, then there’d be no need for Government investment at all.
Ultimately, community hotels, and community pubs, last and survive only as long as the community desires to spend its money in those venues. For Irish pubs, over the last 20 years, the Government has not been able to do much. The public, and their changing choices, are much more to blame than the politicians are.