The hysteric commentator on ITV’s Dancing on Ice final wasn’t afraid to embrace a few stereotypes last night when he posited that a victory in the Bolero for Co Kildare’s Donal McIntyre, self-styled hard man of undercover television reporting, would give Irish viewers another reason to tip alcohol down their throats - “not that they need a reason”.
If only, the drinks industry must be thinking. After a “cold bath” in 2008, it would appear that not even a weekend of rugby-related armchair debauchery was enough to lift the spirits of Drinks Industry Group of Ireland (DIGI) chairman Kieran Tobin this morning as he made the case for a freeze on alcohol excise duty in the emergency budget. “I’m afraid the old reliables no longer really live up their billing,” he sighed, entirely dispirited.
Last year was the worst performing year for the drinks industry in Ireland in 25 years, according to a report compiled for DIGI by DCU economist Anthony Foley. Sober sisters, cross-border shoppers and staying-in-is-the-new-going-out merchants all contributed to a 6 per cent decline in the volume of alcohol consumption last year, compared to an increase of 2.5 per cent in 2007. The decline accelerated in the second half of the year, suggesting that our flatlining personal finances were to blame for our lack of drunken cheer. “It is an unmitigated miserable set of figures,” said Foley. “2009 is shaping up to be a disastrous year.”
Public health officials may celebrate at the thought that our spending hangovers may reduce the frequency of our real hangovers, but it looks like it could be a very small party. For Tobin, whose day job is communications and corporate affairs director for Irish Distillers Pernod Ricard, the prospect of further excise duty hikes in the forthcoming cluster bomb budget is not pleasant.
Already, employment in the Irish drinks industry has retreated from 100,000 to 90,000. With on-trade volumes peaking in 2001, some 1,500-1,600 pubs have called time over the past six years. Meanwhile, Cork’s historic Beamish brewery has closed its doors, cider maker C&C has axed jobs at its Clonmel plant and Diageo has postponed its investment in a new Guinness factory. Another 9,000-10,000 jobs will be lost across all sectors of the drinks industry this year, Tobin predicts.
Taxing the life out of alcohol, like any other tax on expenditure, will be subject to the law of diminishing returns, he argues. DIGI’s protestations may prove futile, however. The Government is scouring for simple and quick ways to raise revenue, meaning even measures that are (economically) counter-productive in the long term must be on the menu. The odds that the old reliables will be hit are sadly lower than the odds of TV commentators updating their patter of cliches about the Irish.
McIntyre lost, incidentally, to Ray “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head” Quinn, not that he seemed to mind. We may now be drinking an average of less than 10 litres of pure alcohol a year for the first time since the 1990s, but the only ice we care about is the ice that comes in our vodka mixers.
