Pubs will quickly find themselves running out of Guinness products if the strike scheduled to begin this morning is prolonged. The action is being taken by five of the six unions in Guinness in support of the 150 employees at Dundalk Packaging who are due to lose their jobs when the plant closes on April 27th.
There was slight ground for optimism last night when unions and management accepted an invitation from the Labour Relations Commission to attend conciliation talks at 2 p.m. today on foot of a proposed new peace formula. Guinness, however, indicated it might present some problems.
The LRC spent all day yesterday attempting to restart the talks after a full day of negotiations on Tuesday, at which there was no sign of a breakthrough. This latest initiative was not sufficient to prevent the strike from going ahead, however.
Many pubs in Dublin have two deliveries weekly - on Mondays, to cover normal weekday trade, and again on Thursdays, to cater for the weekend. Few have ordered extra stocks of Guinness, Smithwicks, Carlsberg or Budweiser in anticipation of a prolonged dispute. Rural pubs normally have only one delivery a week.
"We have not stocked up on Guinness products," a spokeswoman for Capital Bars, one of the largest pub groups in Dublin, said. "We're just carrying our normal weekly stock."
Capital has deliveries on Mondays and Thursdays. "We chose to rely on normal deliveries. The reps were saying the strike would be settled in a day or so. In any event we did not have the space to store extra stock."
Pubs see the respite provided by Good Friday as something of blessing, in the event that the dispute is not settled. Existing stocks could last up to a week, at most. Sherland Entertainment, a pub/night club licensed trader with outlets in Dublin, Cork and Sligo, is similarly placed.
"We have very tight stock controls," the group's operations manager, Ms Belinda Clements, said. Sherland's Dublin outlets have deliveries on either Tuesdays or Thursdays.
Its outlets in Cork should fare slightly better because of local taste for Murphy's and Beamish products, but it would be "unrealistic to rely exclusively on Murphy's or Beamish, which will be fully stretched at the bank holiday weekend".
Mr Richard Dunne, president of the Vintners' Federation of Ireland, which represents 6,000 publicans outside Dublin, urged Guinness and the unions "to reconvene to reach a solution" before "irreparable damage" was inflicted on the drinks industry. If the dispute was not settled, said Mr Dunne, Guinness products were likely to be exhausted within a week.