I’m a recovering alcoholic and I see no problem with it. it’s the individuals choice, 99% of people who excessive drink didn’t start today or yesterday , it’s built up over months and years , education at a young age about the harm and effects is the key..

It would just be another lazy tactic by the government. Banning & taxing are the only things that they seem to be capable of doing.

Oh no! while reading the article i noticed ‘Guinness’ printed on the ticket in the photograph. Come on midday, hurry hurry, im crawling on the walls here.

No, there is nothing wrong with drinking a pint or a glass of wine. nonsense.

I can watch a game without drinking, I think the carlsberg/Guinness/Budweiser etc etc ads are funny and very well thought out at times, It doesn’t make me think ‘right now i’m getting locked’. There are laws in Ireland already where alcohol can’t sponsor under age sport teams and thats fine, instead of banning them and causing clubs to lose revenue, educate the younger people that if the see the name of a drink on their jersey, it doesn’t mean that they have to drink it.

Who is going to sponsor(support) the sports teams in Ireland after this ban? Granny Smith?

i like sports , i like alcohol why cant i have both stop regulating everything already

Sports advertising does not normalise drinking in the same way as watching people constantly drinking at home and in the pub on TV shows like Fair City.

Where is the criticism of irresponsible drinking by all sorts of characters, including a doctor on fair city?

No it shouldn’t be banned, except for high performance sports such as darts!

Sick of this country turning more and more in to a Nanny state. Its getting ridiculous now.

Big issue in irish sport alright, get a grip, minister for sport should be concentrating on encouraging more people into fitness and sports rather than trying to pull some of their biggest sponsors!

Why do we have to put rules on everything? I say fairplay to them for sponsoring sports events. It’s hard to find sponsorship these days.

So what about the 6 Nations? It’s not sponsored by Big Alcohol it’s sponsored by Big Banking.

How harmful has banking been lately?

Car manufacturers frequently sponsor sports.

How many people are killed on our roads every year?

Where will it end?

Anybody who thinks that this should be banned has clearly never been on a commitee running a club/team. In the current economic climate any sort of sponsorship should be hugely accepted with open arms! I have been involved in a sport that recieves practically no funding and rarely gets any sponsorship for years. When our teams go away to play world/European championships the pay the entire costs themselves! If other clubs dont want alcohol companies sponsoring them I can guarantee there are plenty of other organisations that would welcome it!

All alcohol bottles, serving glasses and advertising should be required to have graphic labelling of health warnings as we do now with cigarettes. More people die from alcohol than from smoking.

Why not an image of a diseased tumorous liver on the side of a pint glass, just as we now have with a package of cigarettes? Surely if the cigarette warning has been proven to be effective as a deterrent, in Australia, and soon in Ireland, then the alcohol warnings would also work.

in a perfect world so should sponsorship by fast food companies

Jobs are created from all this promotion, advertisers and promotors gain very valuable revenue from large multinational drinks companies. That filters down to the Joe soap on the street that puts up the sign, that hands out the flier, that puts up the branding at the match etc…. Banning these companies from advertising is madness and not the answer, promoting sensible and safe drinking is the way go…

As long as it’s done in conjunction with the whole drink aware malarkey what’s the harm?

Sponsorship is about creating brand awareness not telling people to go out and drink 10 pints of Bud or you won’t enjoy the game. Where is the Minister going to get the money for this compensation anyway? Does he realize how much money is put into sport by these companies? If every team in the country in every sport took up his offer it would cost a small fortune!

Why dont they be done with it and ban sport. Seems to me everything has to be regulated and taxed control, control.

Whether or not alchohol advertising or sponsorship is banned must be a politictal decision and not a voluntary opt in or out kind of nonsense.
What is absolutely unacceptable is that tax payers should be obliged to compensate organisations that forgo such sponsorship. What stretches the credulity to breaking point is that it should come from the HSE budget!

Someone needs to provide the sponsorship money, and at the moment, alcohol companies are probably the only ones who can. Just because a certain beverage is a sponsor, it doesn’t mean we end up drinking it for breakfast, lunch and dinner and they always acknowledge the DrinkAware campaigns in their advertising, so what’s the problem? Where do we go if alcohol is pulled? Taking motorsport, and MotoGP in particular, for an example, they have a very big sponsorship presence of energy drink companies, with tobacco companies being banned previously, but the very same argument comes up of “should we ban energy drinks sponsorship? Is it making people drink them and become unhealthy?”. If alcohol is banned from sponsoring Irish sport, you can guarantee the next batch of sponsors will still be facing the same problem.

and who will be taking over sponsorship if alcohol advertising is banned?…….I know granny smith apples or maybe nama can sponsor teams maybe leo ardvark should shut his gob and concentrate on his own department and fix the shitty roads with potholes as big as a politicians mouth

I am currently given up the the cigs. But I can safely say that I fail to understand how alcohol which is more dangerous than cigs is been given free reign on our television and everywhere we go without getting a more severe slap on the hand like ciggerettes. Alcohol destroys lives. Drink driving accidents, broken marriages, domestic violence, liver cancer etc etc.

In an ideal World it would be best not to associate alcohol with sport, as it sends out the wrong message to children, they see their favourite sports, teams & players being sponsored by the various drink companies and automatically link the two. On saying that, I would not be in favour of an all out ban, because the drinks companies will simply find another way to spend their huge advertising budgets on targeting the same target group and it’ll only be the sports and their sporting associations that lose out in the long run. What’s more important is that people are encouraged & educated more to drink responsibily, unfortunately in Ireland too many people associate alcohol with getting completely hammered.

ironically enough you cant get a half decent pint of Guinness in either the mackey or hogan stand at Croke park. the last time i was up there and i asked for a pint i got a plastic container with sloppy warm Guinness. it had been left lying around half filled waiting for “the rush” it was been pulled by a child with no clue about bear full stop. maybe it is something Guinness should look into.

Alcohol is still the drug that is destroying most lives and families in this country. It is foolish of people to keep accepting money from the companies marketing the product. Stark facts tell us we should ban the sponsorship of sports by them. Let the government divert some ill spent money from some of their failed projects eg children’s hospital at the Mater and give it to the sports organisations.

Alcohol is no different from tobacco in respect to sport. Companies that sell unhealthy products should not be allowed to sponsor or advertise at sporting events.

They done the same with the tobacco companies and its the biggest mistake they ever made.
Sponsorship is hard come by and if multi million/billion euro companies want to invest then let them.
Look at the sponsors we lost
Marlboro, rothmans, benson and hedges Etc…
Now look at the potential sponsors we will loose
All the energy drinks
Guinness
Magners
Heineken
Carling etc…
What next junk food then bookmakers then local pubs sponsoring local teams.

I would like to see it banned for the sake of children who we all know are fanatical about sport. There are so many other means of advertising for these companies so surely it wouldn’t be a massive issue for the likes of Guinness to lose its link with the Hurling championship!!

Ban it completely. It can be done like smoking was. Lets be the 1st country to do so.

Why do polls have an ”I Don’t Know” option? Government should educate on health and fitness not ban things for the sake of something to do.

They should ban the banks from sponsoring sports with millions taken from all the Irish people who bailed them out. All this so their corporate boxes are full of politicians. It’s immoral.

They do make some quality adds. . but probably not the best for kids to watch. They look up to sports people and obviously this advertising works, or why else would they do it? don’t ban it just limit it perhaps.

Do kids drink because some alcohol company has sponsored a sports tournament. No! Is the increased alcohol consumption of alcohol in Ireland a result of the alcohol sponsorship?!? No!

How much of a nanny state do we want to turn into??!?

The absence of alcohol industry sponsor would be detrimental to the sports industry at both local and national levels and at all codes.

Is it not regulated already or at least a code of practice?