Recently, the Observer Sports Magazine, when profiling Croke Park, had the following to say: ‘Guinness is the somewhat predictable sponsor of the Irish rugby union team. Technically, “the black stuff” isn’t actually black, but a dark ruby red colour due to some of the malted barley being roasted. Ten million pints are bought worldwide every day; a recent survey found that 70 per cent of Irish respondents “felt closer to Guinness” as a result of their sponsorship of the team. Heartwarming.’
In terms of general drinking patterns, Diageo, like most drinks companies, are at pains to point out that problem drinking does nothing for their business model and that advertising is aimed at moderate drinkers.
‘It is in none of our interest[s] to see people being drunk, it damages our reputation and the environment in which we can legitimately operate,’ says Jean Doyle. ‘From a business point of view, the responsible drinking agenda within Diageo is about investing in longer-term consumers of our brands—people who do themselves damage do other people damage also. We don’t want to be trite, but Guinness is two hundred and fifty years old, and it’s not in our interest for people to abuse it and for it to become associated with the problem.’
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Established in 1998, the Guinness archive makes Diageo the only corporate body in Dublin to host their own public archives. With two staff, the facility is a mine of social and economic history. But, to be perfectly honest and juvenile about it, I really only wanted to know two things—how many free drinks did workers get down through the years, and is Guinness really good for you? Since its opening the staff have been gathering and amalgamating documents spread out over the site. Underneath the offices were 3,000 linear metres of paper records, containing 10,000 images, a few hundred cans of film and all sorts of signage, instruments and oddities related to the brewing operation, including the original lease Arthur Guinness signed on the St James’s Gate site in 1759 as well as brewing recipes from the 1790s. About one third of the collection has been catalogued to date, and aside from throwing light on Irish drinking patterns, it also gives an insight into Irish economic and social history, with somewhere in the region of 14,000–16,000 employee files.
Prior to WWI, the workforce was almost 5,000 strong (mostly males), undertaking what was tough physical labour, and being paid 10–20 per cent higher than the average industrial wage in Dublin at the time. Pensions were introduced in the 1880s, at least 30 years before the first National Pension Act came into being. A medical centre was also established in the late nineteenth century for employees and their families. Dublin has always had a housing crisis of sorts, and recognising this, Guinness first started building accommodation for employees in the 1880s with the Rialto Flats and nearby Thomas Court scheme. The company was, in many respects, akin to a mini-Statelet.
Or, as archivist Eibhlin Roche notes, ‘Guinness has been an all-inclusive company and such an integral part of the Irish story. We estimate that by about 1930, one in ten people in Dublin were dependent on Guinness for their livelihood.’
When workers went into pubs to unwind after a day’s graft, their choice of beverage was slightly less complicated than it is today—there was whiskey or there was Guinness. That lack of choice pretty much stayed that way until the 1950s and 1960s, when lager arrived in Ireland. Although thirsty Guinness workers didn’t need to stray all that far for the sup. Three taps were located on site for workers, and instead of a tea break, they could opt for ‘time at the taps’. Men who lined up with their tankards were allowed fill once. For every hour of overtime worked, the entitlement increased (each four hours’ overtime resulted in an extra beer—it would cripple the public service!). The taps closed down some time in the 1970s and the policy changed to take-home beer, such as cans and bottles, a policy that remains to the present day.
Despite allegations from medical professionals that higher volume beers helped fuel today’s binge-drinking culture, the alcohol by volume (ABV) in the present-day pint of Guinness hasn’t changed all that much since its inception. One product, foreign extra stout bottles, which is on sale in Africa and Asia, would have been brewed in the 1800s with a very high ABV rate to enable it to withstand long sea journeys. This was done by adding extra hops into the beer, thereby increasing its longevity. It is still on sale today at 7.5 per cent ABV. But the foreign stuff is the exception; today’s pint of Guinness is the baby of the family, only 50 years old and remaining at 4.2–4.3 per cent ABV since its launch. The general trend for Guinness has been for a fall in ABV since WWI, when additional taxes were placed on barley for beer use. After the war, the ABV never quite reached its pre-First World War years.
Pretty much since the beginning, Guinness was considered good for you. So much so, in fact, that mothers who had just given birth were given a glass of Guinness in maternity wards all over the country as a matter of course. Is there a more insightful example of a country’s relationship with alcohol? ‘It was pretty much widespread for any woman who had given birth, because of iron levels, to be given Guinness,’ says archivist Eibhlin Roche. ‘I mean, up until pretty recently, if you gave blood with any of the blood banks, you were given either a cup of tea or a half pint of Guinness. The company would have provided stock to the Blood Bank and also the maternity hospitals free of charge.’
The association between Guinness and good health, or in other words between alcohol and vitality and robustness, has even deeper roots. The word ‘porter’ derived from the 1700s, when this new dark beer was being produced for the first time and became very popular very quickly with market porters in places like Covent Garden. It had perceived strengthening qualities. The adoption of the name of the beer, then, in the 1700s linked it to this idea that the beer had strength-giving qualities. When Guinness first advertised in 1929, the advertising agency went around to bars in London, asking punters why they were drinking Guinness. Nine out of 10 said because it was good for them. Guinness wasn’t alone at the time, with products like Bovril and smelling salts also advertising their supposed strength-giving dimension, yet somehow with Guinness the tag stuck.
From the early 1930s up until the outbreak of WWII, the company actively encouraged doctors to advocate Guinness for their patients. The archive has hundreds of letters of correspondence from GPS across the UK and Ireland lauding the medicinal properties of the beer and telling how it transformed the lives and ailments of their patients. This kind of begs the question: if that was the attitude of the medical professionals, what chance had wider society to keep tabs on its drinking?
Or maybe it’s perfectly normal for alcohol to be prescribed as medicine and Guinness really is good for you? Dr Chris Luke, consultant in emergency medicine at the Mercy Hospital in Cork, takes a benign view of Guinness. ‘I liken it to Rowntree’s or Quaker Oats, to be honest. I think Guinness have a long and very noble philanthropic tradition, in terms of the Iveagh Trust and providing accommodation for workers and so on. My understanding also is that one of their first medical officers travelled to Germany at the turn of the nineteenth century and visited their systems, bringing a lot of the efficiency there back with him. In addition to that Guinness also had a huge reputation in areas like training in first aid and safety and [in] funding the St John’s Ambulance service.’
When asked, though, whether the product itself was good for you and whether it would still be appropriate in Ireland of 2009 to offer it to patients, Dr Luke said:
‘I would like to think that in 2009 we are beginning to leave behind powdered vitamins and distilled chemicals. I am firmly of the belief that foods can be much better than medicine and Guinness is a foodstuff. It comes down to this, really—how would you prefer to get your iron, vitamin[s] and needed calories into a patient? By pill or injection or by a pint of the black stuff? The bottom line, same when prescribing any medicine, is that if you stick to the right dose, then a patient will get the required iron and vitamins. In the early nineteen-eighties, I remember when I was an intern in St Vincent’s Hospital in County We
xford and we prescribed whiskey and brandy at night to patients. I think it was a very valuable tradition. For example, if your seventy-five-year-old grandmother is used to a sherry at night before admittance, then in my experience it’s much better to continue with that small glass in hospital than to give a Valium. Many people have learned the hard way that chemical substitutes can be a lot more addictive than a glass of sherry. I’m not encouraging or recommending a free-for-all, but if you’re asking me if a glass of Guinness can be medicinally useful, then I think yes, it can.’
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Following the conversation by phone with Dr Luke, I was interested in the wider role alcohol plays in society, and how alcohol and health impact on a day-to-day basis in one of Ireland’s hospitals. So I arranged to meet Dr Luke at the Mercy Hospital. When I got there, at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, he began our meeting by taking me through a labyrinth of corridors, past makeshift waiting rooms, canteens turned into consulting areas, overstretched staff and impatient patients. While he wanted to set in context his thoughts on drink, Irish society and its implications on health, he also wanted to show what the second A&E unit in Ireland’s second city looks like at what should be a relatively quiet time. He says whatever past impression there may have been of the medicinal properties of specific brews, 55 per cent of all patients who pass through the Accident and Emergency doors are there because of alcohol-related illnesses or incidents. Having said that, he’s not fully discarding the general medicinal properties of alcohol and its benefits for society.
‘About ninety per cent of us drink,’ he says. ‘We love to drink and regard it quite rightly as a divine gift and I have a lot of sympathy for that idea. I’m interested in toxicology. I’m interested in herbal medication and drugs, both clinical and illegal, because they have such an impact on my work in lectures to parents. So you have cocoa leaf in the Andes and you have cannabis in Afghanistan. Wherever you go, particularly where the landscape is hostile, you often get tucked away in the undergrowth a divine emollient, which eases the grim predicament of existence, to quote Beckett. I’ve absolutely no problem with the fact there are natural entities that have a God-given purpose to be there. If you are a native Andean Indian struggling in the low-oxygen height of rugged terrain in the Andes, lifting granite blocks to build Aztec temples—why not chew cocoa leaf?’
While the Guinness brewing operation stretches back 250 years, Dr Luke points to the fact that the Irish have always had a relationship with mind- and mood-altering substances long before the Guinness family got in on the act.
‘Our remedies seem to be mushrooms and alcohol and those are the truly ancient intoxicants. I often joke that the reason we have such fabulous Celtic mythology is because of fabulous Celtic mushrooms! That’s partly humorous, but I’m certain psychadelia has a role to play in Celtic mythology and Celtic culture and designs and much of that has come from mushrooms. Similarly with alcohol, we have had alcohol since the dawn of time, with mead and beer and cider, so I mean it’s utterly natural.’
The difference nowadays, he says, is in concentration of alcohol in products and in the range available. ‘Fast forward the last five hundred to one thousand years of globalisation, which really means the conquistadors and the taking over of the American wilderness and the taking over of Australia. In tandem with that has been the taking back of exotic fruits and drugs. By the time we get to [the] year 2000, at the peak of the Celtic Tiger, the population who are well used to mushrooms and drink suddenly have access to all this exotic range of intoxicants and also have the money to afford it. What we have is the native natural alcohol consumption suddenly multiplied by increasing concentration of the alcohol. In addition to that, you have the consumption of other drugs that are relatively new to our culture.’
In terms of concentration, while Guinness may buck the trend by offering lower-strength ranges, the general trend over the last two decades has been for higher concentrations of alcohol in the majority of products. ‘What happened is that in the last twenty years we have seen an increase in the concentration—a doubling, effectively. It’s very difficult now to go into any shop and to get less than fourteen per cent alcohol in a bottle of wine, for example. That’s a fact, so in a sense, drugs fuelled drink consumption and drink fuels drug consumption and that’s what’s new. So you have both a diversity and scale which is new and that’s where I come in. The impact on the Emergency department is really [astonishing] if you look at it very carefully. My own feeling is that many attendances to A&E departments are fuelled by drink and drugs. Nearly one third of the population of Ireland attend an A&E department every year, which is good reason for investing in them, and we’re talking in excess of 1.25 million people. I’m convinced that more than fifty per cent come to hospital urgently, suddenly, unexpectedly, because of drink- or drug-fuelled mishap or ailment. I’m also including tobacco. I’m talking about shots of alcohol, which are extraordinarily strong compared to what they were twenty or thirty years ago. I’m talking about drink-fuelled consumption of cocaine. I’m talking about the misuse of marginally legal drugs from head shops. I’m talking about the misuse of over-the-counter drugs, inappropriate prescriptions of drugs by doctors. If you put it all together, I’m certain that it adds up to the majority of our patients. So it’s quite an extraordinary figure and the bottom line is that this all results from, in my view, an increase in concentration of alcohol, not the volume.’
Dr Luke points out that alcohol consumption levels have been moving upwards since the late 1950 or 1960s, as the Irish economy has gone through economic and social changes and improvements. ‘In the last fifteen years, we have seen a normalisation of intoxication of both . . . genders,’ he says. ‘Women are now beginning to overtake men in terms of binge-drinking and liver failure and young girls are beginning to overtake teenage boys in terms of premature presentations.’ He notes that companies like Diageo have been saying consumption has stabilised and says he’s ‘optimistic our dwindling prosperity will bring some kind of dip in the overall volume consumed’. He seems to be agreeing with the drinks industry—that a comprehensive, multifaceted approach to the issue of problem drinking in Ireland is what is needed. ‘My main concern is the numbers, rather than the style or morality or philosophical issues. Ultimately, it’s figures we need to think about, and my own feeling is that we should really try to define or describe the scale of the problem numerically. I really think that police should screen for alcohol or cannabis or cocaine in anybody that has been arrested for violence or disorder. I really think we have to measure alcohol measures in almost every patient for a period of time until we get some sort of idea.’
In terms of our drinking habits, the industry has a huge role to play in lowering the ABV levels. ‘I don’t think we should worry about volume; I think we should stop concentrating. What I mean by that is that the shots culture is the embodiment of catastrophic concentration. So you’re moving from Babycham, light ales, Indian ales and little sherries of the 1970s and 1960s, to these high concentrations of alcohol with forty per cent and fifty per cent which are actually lethal.’
Dr Luke says his ambition over the next 20 years would be to see wine dropping back towards 7 per cent and 8 per cent ABV and beer dropping back towards 3 per cent and 4 per cent.
‘That means that we can return to the ancient order of pub culture, which worked so well for so many years in Ireland. Paradoxically I think that pubs have a lot to offer in terms of stabilising our culture. Going to the pub in Ireland in the 1970s it was perfectly possible to go to a snug and sit chatting for hours and hours and hours while nursing just half a pint of beer. Because that’s all you could afford. There is nothing inherently impossible about nursing half a pint of shandy, even, for hours at a time. The atmosphere in the pubs has been so altered by the Celtic Tiger, particularly, that the atmosphere is often hostile or menacing and not conducive to conversation. I yearn for the days when we can revive our oral tradition, because that is what was great about Ireland in
the 1970s and 1980s. It was about conversation and comedy and creativity and that, to me, is what craic was. It was obviously lubricated to some extent by libation, but it was fundamentally about conversation.’
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The decline of the bar trade is therefore a cause for concern, not just for the drinks industry and health professionals, but also for wider society. Diageo company representatives had pointed out that off-trade or at-home drinking is not regulated in any regard, while ‘on-premise’ consumption is very highly regulated. The move from pub to at-home drinking has also had repercussions for another sector of the drinks industry, often seen as the whipping boys for the ills of Ireland’s association with alcohol. I’m talking, of course, about nightclubs.
The clubbing scene gathered pace in the 1970s and 1980s, but really came into its own commercially in the 1990s, with the rise of the dance scene and new drugs such as Ecstasy. In the days before late-night bar licences, a proper night out wasn’t complete without a visit to a club. Dr Luke has studied the club culture, and firmly links the alcohol epidemic to the rise of the drug scene and vice versa. ‘You can’t have one without the other; one of the reasons we have such increasing concentration of alcohol consumed, in my opinion, is because of the advent of Ecstasy in the late 1980s. The acid house culture meant that the drinks industry were suddenly threatened by a collapse in their profits and they retaliated, as it were, by employing the designers who had brought the music and clubs and fashion and so forth, to the deployment of vehicles of drink. They also increased the strength of drink from the 1970s to the 1990s. So you end up with psychedelic drinks, coloured, blue, green, any kind of neon, and delivered in very trendy sexy vehicles that were very sweet and very tasty, particularly to young women.’
Dr Luke has a point, and for anyone who experienced the clubbing mecca of Sir Henry’s nightclub in Cork or any other thriving nightclub in the 1990s and 2000s, there weren’t many pints of the black stuff being poured! In earlier chapters, I referred to the allure with which nightclubs in small towns, such as the Queens in Ennis, were viewed in local folklore. They were sites of almost limitless possibility, where dreams were made, and many a nightmare began well before the chip van had pulled away. In the first few years of sobriety, I went to a few clubs, but for me, sobriety and late-night clubbing just don’t gel. Some clubs, where the focus is more on music and ambience, can be tolerated, but generally the drinking den/cattle-mart variety holds little appeal for the non-drinker. Many of the clubs I frequented in the 1990s and 2000s are gone now (Sir Henry’s was knocked down a few years back), although the Queens in Ennis is still going strong. In the bar of the Harcourt Street Hotel, in the heart of Dublin’s nightclub sector, I met with Barry O’Sullivan, the Chief Executive of the Irish Nightclub Association (INA), who told me about the decline of the sector and how the industry is calling for extended opening hours and how changing drinking patterns have impacted on his members. By the year 2000, the association estimates that there were 530 nightclubs in Ireland—in 2007 this figure had shrunk to 330. ‘The rise of nightclub culture grew from the late 1970s and 1980s. The biggest change that happened for nightclubs since that growth was in 2000, when government removed the requirement for nightclubs to serve meal[s]. That gave birth to what we all know now as late bars,’ explains Barry O’Sullivan.
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