As long as the price of the pint of Murphy’s stays the same…all is good.

Hobgoblin i found to be a nice red ale lately, makes a nice refreshing change from stout or lager too. We are surrounded by lovely micro brewery drafts and bottles of all decriptions, local and foreign, and personally its a real shame so many people solely Heineken and the other nasty beers laced with chemicals and supporting the likes of greedy Diageo, when there is a world of choice there to be discovered

Well said. That fake holiday has to be paid for somehow!!! Here’s to Diageo.

Suckers? Gimmick? Lighten up, I had a great day out!

Desperate Dan talks some sense. If he will bring back his chew bars then I’m with him on this one (the black bit aren’t coal)

Those bars are my personal stash ;)

Those bars were the most amazing thing ever! Black crystals were the best!

Vat, duty, wage costs are all much lower.

Neil. Both Guinness and Bulmers for the British market are made here.

Medical insurance, car insurance, home insurance, road tax will fly up again next year and now the sacred pint! The end is nigh

Ask any tillage farmer: Barley is over 20% dearer now than it was this time last year.
It’s hardly a scandal that beer would be a bit dearer too.

Agreed dave, the pubs rip their customers off for minerals. A bigger scandal is what they charge for 33 cl bottles of beer. The vfi should commit not to increase the price at the pumps any more than 5c. That might be a worthy press release.

worked in well over 18 public houses during my college days about 5 years ago and they’d tell you everything about the business except how much they paid per keg. cute foxes

Have you any idea of the overhead costs involved in running a pub? €5.50 isn’t just for your beverage. It also covers the exorbitant Sky subscription cost the publican is paying for the pleasure of your match viewing. I do agree that soft drinks are overpriced though, and there should be a reintroduction of the designated driver freebie soft drink for weekend nights or something similar.

yep i have a reasonable understanding of business costs and I similarly know when I am being completely ripped of , and 5.50 for a pint of soft drink is a complete rip off , you can be sure the sky fees are a red herring as although they are higher than home subs they also attract a lot of customers and wouldn’t be used by pubs at all if they didn’t ,( as it happens the game was on RTE 2 and I could have easily just gone straight home to watch )The pub offering is not increased with the rip off pricing of soft drinks and at 5.50 for a rock shandy they are actually making a far better profit margin on that than a pint of alcohol…the main point here was the article was saying they are doing everything in their power to stay in business which is horse shite at these prices.

I’d have a bit more sympathy for them if they didn’t charge more for a pint of soft drink (with no tax) than they do for a pint of Guinness or Heineken…

Lulz

The variation in the price from one pub to another is about a euro ,so does it make much difference ,if it does drink Murpheys

could have a point there dna30, in the u.k in the 80′s the big brewers (along side the government) kept pushing up the price of a pint, and the number of people, myself included, that started brewing their own beer went through the roof, you could brew 40 pints of stout for less than a tenner ! and if done properly it was good stuff too, Diagio want the best of both worlds, compared to pubs in the u.k they have no outlets of there own like the breweries in the u.k do, so if the I.V.A and its members are ‘upset’ about Diagio putting up it’s prices then the answer is to boycott them, go to another supplier, Murphy’s or Beamish stout, or try supporting one of the local micro brewers, you dont have to buy from Diagio and unlike in the U.K., (where the breweries own the lease on the pubs, and therefore control what you buy and who you buy it from) pub landlords are free to sell whatever beer they wish to sell, a couple of weeks with sales plummeting would soon change Diagios mindset.

your right Eric and dna30 brew your own and i am boycotting all diageo products ,Arthur’s day what a joke if you had ever read “The search for god and Guinness”you would know that Arthur would be turning in his grave at the mere thought of this cynical publicity stunt and at a time when we are all on our knees they want to increase profits drank my last Guinness!!

Agreed. Pubs should make more of a focus on this area where there is real potential to creat local employment.

Why is nobody blaming Enda?

Thats pretty much government logic

Niall I heard you can sink quite a few after football on a Thursday evening, it’s the thirst after all that footie, from the middle aged team!!! Want to watch the knees, hips and heart.

Youre right Les.
Its a calamity.

Your right but when I was working in a restaurant in 1995 I got £2.50 an hour so I took 4 hours work to get that £10. Minimum wage is now about 9.31 in a restaurant so I think it’s cheaper now ?

The minimum wage is ?8.65 and the price of a pint in most Dublin city pubs is ?5.40, pure rip off. I’ll just stay home and keep having my mates over :-)

I think barmen ( the ones that did it as an apprentice) have a union rate of €19 per hour ??

Agreed. God be good to the days when you could get battered without having to bankrupt yourself. People didn’t drink as much years ago though. There was plenty of Guinness but no shorts, no slamming pints. The price of drink in this country is as outrageous as the amount we drink on a night out. I’m not innocent of this. On a night out I can blast through a lot of the damn stuff.

Beamish is 50c cheaper and tastes similar to Guinness.

Heineken and Bulmers will increase in price next week.
They let Diageo take all the grief and then they move

Don’t be naive, its a business they are all runing not a charity

Agreed @PJBrowne. I worked in a very busy bar in Tralee and back in the ’80s when Guinness owned Harp the landlady stopped serving it after a price increase (awful stuff anyway). She called Guinness to remove their taps and pipes from the premises to no avail. After a few weeks, frustrated she rang for the last time and told them that “if nobody comes to collect your equipment, you’ll find it on the street tomorrow morning” . sure enough, two hours later a very flustered Rep arrives with two free kegs and a pricing arrangement practically begging for the harp to be put back on sale. That’s how you do business!

Sadly the Heineken brewery historically follow suit about a week after every Diago increase. Many pubs have taken the hit on the last couple of 5 cent hikes but with running cost staying the same it could be hard to carry it this time.

i heard you buy by the gallon not the bottle

Plus .. Keeps drunk drivers off the streets

The same Arthur Guinness that was a unionist? mad hero worship forgetting the fact that he supported colonialism in this country and he was very much allied with the English elite and also he directly opposed any movements for independence.

His son also called Arthur Guinness was much much worse and he opposed Daniel O’Connell, Arthur voted against any attempts to repeal the act of union.

Then there is Arthur’s son Benjamin Guinness, who is worse yet again. Who said after being elected Lord Mayor of Dublin of the nationalists:
“Those wicked and worthless adventurers who would not only deprive our country of the advantages which, as a part of the British Empire, we enjoy, but who would overturn all the social arrangements of society.”

Representatives of the Guinness family spoke to the House of Commons in 1916 to recommend the execution of the 1916 rebels. So in short they are people we shouldn’t be celebrating at all.

…But lets all forget about that so some sheep have a usable excuse to go on the piss and give his company massive profits and fall for their daft PR campaigns!

read a book not propaganda so what he was a protestant and half his family were in the church and banking you will always have black sheep in any family in any generation so what most of it is history except for the idiot brit bashers.The whole of Europe is guilty of colonial oppression to the third world we were just unlucky enough to be next door to the brits do you think if we were next door to the Spanish French or the rest it would have been different ?and Arthur’s day was invented by a multi national for profit read “the search for god and Guinness” probably more propaganda but everyone is entitled to their own opinion even you

I visited Arthur’s grave. (not on purpose) he’s buried up near Celbridge.

I remember back in the good ole days (the early 90s), when Carling and Harp were the default lagers in most boozers before Heineken and Bud took control. Carling was an awful drink, it probably still is. Anyways, it’s good to see publicans wising up and offering customers reasonably priced pints.

Fosters & Tuborg 3 euro in my local. Sells well too.

Take note publicans. This is the type of choice we are after.

I think if you sell more at a cheaper price instead of raising prices and selling less at a more expensive price, you are way better off .. People are pricing themselves out of customers .

Robbie depends on the rep in my experience. Worked in a few bars in Dublin and Kerry. Guinness did a few good promos in Dublin in my time. Nothing in Munster worthy of talking about. Murphy’s meanwhile go out of their way down here. Or did. Left the bar trade a few years back but that was how it was then.

You’d be getting a much better pint too!

You are totally correct. Big suppliers have given up on the pubs to focus on shifting large volume thru off-sales. Profit is the game and they will go to where that can be delivered most efficiently. Sad for the on-trade and not good for controlling consumption among under age.

@GRINDER

Profit is not the same at all. The pub trade returns a significantly higher margin for all beer/cider producers.

There is no price competition in the pub-trade – it is an oligopolistic supply chain supported by the retailers.

No imported equivalent, and significant scale economies add to it.

None of that exists in the off-trade

Apols GRINDER, misread your comment ‘game’ not ‘same’

Very bad timing by Diageo. They spend millions enticing people out of their homes to celebrate arthur’s day and then announce a price hike on most of their products to send people back to their homes. Silly

I’m brewing right now.

Wont be drinking less. Just not drinking in pubs.

Smooth move diageo! I’ll stick to the craft beers thanks

Hope they do the same with cigarettes

In fairness we drink far too much in this country! Most people think drinking 6+ pints most nights out is ok!! When it’s damaging to your physical and mental health, not to mention costly to you and/or society. Of course we all over indulge now and again but we need to stop considering binge drinking as ok/normal.

In fairness we drink far too much in this country! Most people think drinking 6+ pints most nights out is ok!! When it’s damaging to your physical and mental health, not to mention costly to you and/or society. Of course we all over indulge now and again but we need to stop considering binge drinking as ok/normal….

It’ll go up in price for home consumption as well. The grains for making drink are were the cost increase has come from.

Jesus, thats a lot of red thumbs

John Foody,
Agree with you that we drink too much, but this isn’t about that. I doubt Diageo want people to drink less. Perhaps they are trying to sell their other products instead and I’d say they’ve done their cost-benefit analysis.

That’s the most thumb downs I have ever seen on this.

A nation of pathetic turds. The most red thumbs down on the site most of us have ever seen, over a 5c increase in the price of a pint.

This country should be concreted over, the people here are the weakest, most cowardly people in the world.

A pathetic race of cowards nowadays, it wasn’t always the way, but who can doubt it now.

700 red thumbs? Over 5c? Holy molers, I think that just about labours the point. Get over yourselves.

Just because you feel ‘ireland’ has a drinking problem, you feel it is ok that alcohol prices get even higher.. all about you isn’t it?

You should stand in A&E on any given night, you’d soon change your opinion.
The attitude towards alcohol in Ireland is almost worse than the actual problem itself – as is identified by the fact that people feel exercised enough to thumb down over 5c. I stand by my comment – in fact – raise it more. Same for cigarettes. Legalise recreational drugs, make them available on prescription, and tax the hell out of them. Return the funds to the services that are already bursting at the seams.
People are all too quick to protect their interest, but if you removed patients from Irish hospitals who need treatment as a direct consequence of drinking, smoking or taking drugs, you’d be on the road to clearing most of the waiting lists in the country.

Add on extra vat + round the price up to the nearest 5c.