The VFI should try telling it’s members to cut their prices and they might get people back in their pubs again! People vote with their feet when they know they are being ripped off and if you want to get ripped off in Ireland then a pub is a good bet! The overpricing of both alcoholic and soft drinks in Irish pubs, clubs, hotels and restaurants has gotten way out of sync with peoples disposable income and until the publicans, brewers and govt. wake up to that fact then more of them are going to go out of business. The Irish govt., needs to pay heed too with the 3rd highest excise in Europe they are only adding to the absurd prices and driving people away from the pubs. They need to cut the excise it’s extortionate! Rural pubs have another problem in that tougher drink drive laws mean people simply are not prepared to drive to outlying pubs anymore especially if they find that they are not getting good value for money.

ok so the government reduces duty by a few percent giving publicans a much needed boost but a week later publicans are so grateful they increase prices by double the amount for Christmas. this has happened before and would happen again!

I agree they ripped us off for years and can now go to hell, some place I have been in charged 1.50 for pint of water and dash of orange, long live supermarket We do party night ong my friends and great time and don’t feel ripped off.

Lower prices,increase quality and stock Erdinger.

Its a dying trade i think… Pubs were popping up everywhere during the boom party years. I work for a leading UK water management company and i proposed a simple device to the VFI to knock thousands off their annual water bills by electronically controlling the mens auto flush urinals in every pub. The device cost €200 as a one off. I got NO reply. Rates my ass.

Pint of Guinness,4.70. Half pint, 3.20!

Here endeth the lesson.

My heart bleeds for these poor chaps. On a totally unrelated point, my Super Value are doing a slab of Bud/Bulmers large cans for 25 yoyos. 24 cans or 6 pints next door?

Publicans have been gouging us for years. It is not the consumers problem that they massively overpaid for premise over the past 15 years. The days of the drinking house are, quite rightly, numbered. Roll on the cafe bar and lets have more pub restaraunts. There are very few countries in the world were an establishment can thrive selling only drink at outrageous prices.

Sick of pubs whining about losing business- instead of demanding government aid, how about looking at your business model and um perhaps improving it to get more punters in?
Here are three areas to get you started: not such a smart idea to be charging 2007 prices for drinks, serving dull overpriced food menus, and expecting people to be happy with a very limited choice of (bland) beers.

Instead, have food and drink promotions, put on table quizzes/race nights and the like, and look into the thousands of excellent small breweries around the world.

Hotels and restaurants around Ireland have generally responded to the recesssion in a positive customer focused way- why can’t pubs?

As one publican said before , around the smoking ban ” we run the country not the politicians ” the well has run dry get over it , and turn ur pub into a spar

I know a pub in west of Ireland where they lowered the price of their drink on all the spirits, draft and bottles, even giving the odd free mineral to the driver. They were the cheapest in the town. They were also members of the VFI. Over the following weeks, they kept getting calls from other local pubs asking what they were doing and telling them they should not be so cheap, that it was “bad for business”. The pub stuck with the prices and ignored the other publicans. A week or two later, that pub got calls from the VFI telling them to raise their prices and “get in line” with the other pubs in the town or face being thrown out of the VFI. In the end the pub bowed to the pressure but still kept the prices €0.50/€.25 cheaper than the other pubs. And it’s still one of the few pubs making a profit in the town. The VFI are simply greedy and the authors of their own destruction. They have lost the monopoly they once demanded and are now cribbing about the supermarkets and off-licences taking their business. Fact is the VFI drove their customers away by their greed.

The pubs are not enticing people to come anymore. They have a band in the corner, that’s nice, but they take over the whole pub. They are too loud sometimes. People go to the pub for the chat and a pint.

Minerals and dashes should be free to entice designated drivers. €2.50/€3 for a small bottle of coke is disgraceful.

Shots/shorts are highly overpriced, €2.50 to €5 in some cases. This should be minimum of €1.50.

Pints should stay the same, or at least €5 or less. Not having enough for 2 pints with a tenner is shocking.

I like the idea of Vat exception for people carriers for pubs. This is a good thing to be honest.

30,000 jobs lost at cost of WHAT!!! eu630 million? This is a contribution of eu21,000 per job.This is the VFI claiming that the average pub employee has a comfortable salary of about eu50k per year.. I am sure there are many people in Ireland today who would welcome such a remunerative opportunity.Unfortunately, this is a lie. I must repeat this – it is a mendacious, distorted,deceitful, duplicitous, fallacious, fraudulent, insincere, lie, motivated by their own short term, self-important, pious interests.

The VFI can survive only if they get consumers on their side. They could start by dropping their pretentious & untruthful name. A Vintner is a winemaker. These people are not vintners, they are operators of public houses.
Many of them, to be fair, have made large investments in their businesses, but a combination of drink driving laws, anti-smoking laws, cheap supermarkets ,off-licenses, and societal change are killing their hitherto monopolistic business practices. This is wonderful, and I hope that the pharmacists are next in line!

I am sympathetic to them as individuals, but their collective voice is toxic & best disregarded.

They are gradually adopting, many offer decent food, & some offer decent entertainment – but the eu4+ per pint model will kill them – and if they maintain this business model, it will be suicide, not murder.

I have seen in some pubs bottles of Coors & Bud with the label not for individual sale on the shelves.

off to Tesco

I can see some argument surrounding alcohol being relatively expensive and kept that way. If I head to the pub and decide I want to have a fruit juice, it’s €2.50-€3 for a 250ml bottle of orange juice. I can get a litre of the stuff in Aldi for 99c. Personally, I don’t want the fancy bottle and would be happy with a dash out of a carton and a glass. I’d be even happier if the cost was then €1-€1.20 which there’s no reason it couldn’t be. It’s initiatives like this that would make me go out more. I must say that here in Galway as well it’s possible to get pints for €3 in places. Those are the pubs I head to!

a lot of pubs did spend years ripping people off but right now there are genuine places going out of business and to say the only reason that they are is because “dastardly” publicans would rather be bankrupt than lower prices on drinks isnt a fair representation of the true circumstances of a lot of the industry

I had relatives over from the UK recently, and they were appalled by the pubs they visited here. Every establishment serving the same bland choice of Heineken, Carlsberg, Budweiser, Bulmers and Guinness – cheap, tasteless, fizzy, ‘Brewed under license’ crap.

Visit any decent pub/bar in the UK, Europe, even the USA these days and you are generally offered a selection of quality, often local beers and ciders including a selection of guest ales that rotates every week or so. VFI members, have a look at the growing selection of quality beers being stocked in supermarkets/off licenses these days and you will find the reason why I rarely visit a pub in Ireland these days.

Bizarre comparing supermarket prices to pub prices. Any home-owner should appreciate the volume of bills that have to be paid before dinner is put on the table. Multiply them by silly numbers and then start paying the kids by the hour. Pay massive tv sports commercial rates, cctv, pest control, mortgage or lease, insurance, countless maintenance contracts, fire extinguishers, grease traps, licences, not to mention stock and wages etc. A euro a can factors in none of these costs and is often sold at no profit to get you into the supermarket.

A lot of your comments here are quite biased towards the pub industry. Some people don’t seem to realise the running costs of a public house mortgage,rates, esb, wages, insurance, taxes, sky tv( robbery)and the VFI trying to get the rates dropped is a great start towards lowering the price of a Pint in your local. In this climate there’s not many publicans that are greedy, but if there is they deserve to close down. The below cost selling in supermarkets is killing the pub, it’s all well and good you can get your cans or bottles for less then €1 each but the reality is wholesalers can’t supply pubs at this cost. Tesco and dunnes are able to bulk buy and don’t care if they sell alcohol at a loss, they make it back elsewhere. The government need to take action and lower excise and implement a stop to below cost selling, 8 years ago the cheapest a crate of cans was €40!! SMcB the pub in Dublin 6 obviously has a late license, do you know it’s costs €500 per night for this plus court fees then add security and extra staff costs, so the extra 50c on a pint isn’t a whole lot. Nearly any late bar with no cover charge will do this. I run a bar in a suburban town and would hate to have to let any staff go. There is no business Monday to Thursday anymore so we rely on the weekends. I do everything I can to entice customers in and make sure they get value for money. I know it’s tough for people and when they go out one night a week they want value. I don’t hear too many people giving out about there local convenience store ripping them off and most of the time they are.