Marathon man's troubled brew

As any Irish person will know, the fine old expression "your only man" relates neither to the politician with the good fortune to be in temporary public favour, nor to one's male spouse, but to Arthur Guinness, purveyor of the pint of plain.

This is an issue currently exercising the mind of Mr Tom Kitt, the Minister of State for Enterprise, Trade and Employment.

The six-month price-freeze on drink was lifted earlier this month, and Mr Kitt made it clear that he took a dim view of publicans "creaming off excessive profits in the more fashionable areas of Dublin".

The Licensed Vintners' Association (LVA) has taken an equally dim view of Mr Kitt's suggestion that pub-licensing could be liberalised if the price of drink continued to rise.

This week Mr Frank Fell, chief executive of the Licensed Vintners' Association, accused Mr Kitt of making "cheap political capital" out of what Mr Fell saw as good reasons for increasing prices, such as the higher cost of wages.

In the Shelbourne a pint of Guinness will set you back £2.98. Obviously, pricing it at the usual cut-off figure, £2.99, would make it seem as if you were buying a pack of socks in a chainstore. But £2.98 doesn't have any such vulgar cut-price connotations.

Anyway, the Shelbourne appears to serve the most expensive pint in Dublin: the Merrion charges £2.83, and the Morrison £2.68. The Stag's Head, second-oldest pub in Dublin, seems to survive perfectly all right by selling the same pint for the relative bargain price of £2.40, a cool 58p less than the Shelbourne.

The LVA may not think so, but Mr Kitt could well have hit on an issue which is likely to garner him quite a bit of public approval. To the average punter, the price of a pint these days is part of the grim guessing game that seems to accompany all potential economic outlays now. Whether you're considering a purchase as large as that of a house or as small as a pint of Guinness, there seems to be some assumption by both parties that it'll cost you far more than you ever dreamed you'd pay. Consumers are, frankly, fed up.

Mr Kitt was born in Galway in 1952. Politics was part of family life: father Michael was a TD and junior minister. His own eldest son, David, is regarded as a rising star in the indie music field.

After training as a national school teacher in St Patrick's, Drumcondra, he taught for some years before entering politics full time. He was a member of Dublin County Council from 1979 to 1992: in 1992 he was appointed Minister of State at the Department of the Taoiseach with special responsibility for arts, culture, women's affairs and European affairs.

Mr Kitt does not seem to be in possession of the usual politician's gift of the gab. The general view is that he lacks the slick presentation skills of most politicians, who can sound-bite effortlessly at short notice, and the lack of which leaves Kitt sounding well-nigh inarticulate at times.

When his portfolio included responsibility for women's affairs, according to a reporter who interviewed him at the time, he had quite a bit of difficulty actually referring to women as "women". His instinctive address for the fair sex was "ladies". Nothing wrong with this, of course, but it did smack of being some distance removed from the robust reality of the portfolio. "Ladies' Affairs" calls up quaint images of Victorian activities such as needlework.

Mr Kitt's great political rival is his fellow Galwegian, the Chief Whip, Mr Seamus Brennan, with whom he shares the constituency of Dublin South. The prize of a Cabinet post looks set to elude Mr Kitt as long as Mr Brennan holds his position: two cabinet ministers in the same constituency is politically regarded as one too many.

As a councillor back in 1987, and then still working as a teacher, Mr Kitt filled out a questionnaire for this newspaper's library. Mention factors that attributed to your success or failure in Dail election (optional), it requested.

Mr Kitt responded: "Ran as third support candidate in Dublin South thereby helping to elect N. Andrews and S. Brennan - Andrews now in Europe (T. Kitt polled over 4,000 first preferences in last general election)."

Some 13 years later that Also Ran inference in Mr Kitt's answer, and the feeling of a man patiently biding his time, still hold. Well-known as a marathon competitor, he's so proud of his athletic ability that it's the only personal detail mentioned in his otherwise functional political CV on the Fianna Fail website. Mr Kitt has run five Dublin marathons, as well as in Berlin, Belfast and Boston.

Perhaps all that marathon training is Mr Kitt's way of signalling that he's here for the long haul.