Ireland Has a Drinking Problem: Pubs Only Accessible by Car

Nov. 21, 2009 — -- I take up my battered old bugle to blow a brazen blast of praise over my Irish Voice colleague John Spain for his piece recently about the crazy new drink driving legislation moving rapidly towards the statute books even as we speak.

John and I most often sing from different ends of the sheet, as well as from different coasts, but by heavens the next time I meet him in a country pub the drinks will be on me. Every comma of his column and every word of it rings as pure truth.

I salute him. I echo his every word.

I'd forgotten (we worked together one time) that John is a bogman like myself. He mentioned that along the way of his ire about the upcoming new law that will mean that you cannot legally take even one pint of porter without being over the sharply reduced 50mg blood alcohol level.

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The move has come from Transport Minister Noel Dempsey. He is from Meath and that is more than a little bit significant maybe.

He's a countryman technically, but hardly truly. Meath has the best land in Ireland. You'd have to search hard for a bog there, never mind a bogman.

Also Meath is now essentially a part of greater Dublin. There are more taxis and hackneys and coaches there than in all of Connacht. There is never any trouble in obtaining transport home from the pub.

Anyway, all the county's once remote regions have been crammed with housing estates built by the Celtic Tiger. It would be difficult enough now to find an old style country pub that is miles from anywhere in Meath.

It is not at all typical of the huge remote swathes of the west and south west and north. And these are the main areas where the country pubs are already being wiped out and emptied.

And they are the areas for which the old and venerable pubs are of most benefit for an aging and scattered rural population. They are their community centers, now being attacked on every side and at every level.

I have written here recently about just how socially serious the disappearance of the rural pubs is for the folk who live in the very real but Hidden Ireland.