Come Get Some Irish In Ye

O'BRIENSBRIDGE, Ireland — Synthetic Irish bars may be thriving around the world, but in Ireland the real thing is in danger of extinction.

One of the best-loved rural pubs has long been The Old Mill Bar and Restaurant, a picturesque ivy-clad tavern with red-washed walls and vintage tobacco signs. It is situated in the center of O’Briensbridge, a one-street village on the banks of the River Shannon in County Clare.

This delightful two-centuries-old roadhouse was judged the best country pub in Ireland in the Licensing World Bar Awards of 2008. Business was booming then and it employed 20 people.
But when I went there for lunch last week, hoping to enjoy a bite and talk to the owner about the fate of Irish pubs, I found it closed.

Above the door was a large sign with the words “FOR SALE” and the telephone number of an auctioneer.

I tried the two other listed pubs in the village (population 213): Ryan Darby’s and Betty Boner’s. Ryan Darby’s was closed until evening time and the doors were locked. So too was Bonner’s, a quaint old-style country pub which doubles as a grocery store.

Local Margaret Keogh was, however, tending Bonner’s tiny shop counter.

“The daytime trade has gone,” she lamented. “The older people who would come in during the afternoon and sit over a pint of Guinness have all died, and the younger people don’t drink during the day. They haven’t the money.”

Besides, she said, alcohol is sold so cheaply in the supermarkets these days that people are drinking more at home.

What is happening in O’Briensbridge is symptomatic of the fate of one of Ireland’s main tourist attractions, the quaint pub with local characters, like Pat Cohan’s bar in Cong, County Mayo. It was made famous by the film “The Quiet Man” starring John Wayne, though that interior was constructed on a movie set in Hollywood.

.Thirty pubs in addition to The Old Mill closed in County Clare in the last year, according to reporter Dan Danaher of the Clare Champion newspaper. By comparison, only six drink licenses were lost in the previous two years.

Danaher blames cheap supermarket prices for alcohol, a fall in disposable income and a changing culture.

“You can go to the supermarket and get 20 bottles of Budweiser for 15 euro [$20.50] but in the pub you would pay 4 euro [$5.50] for one bottle,” he explained. “Also people are becoming more independent, they are looking for different things. It’s unusual to see people in a pub in the afternoon, though they will go to see matches on television.”

The decline started with a smoking ban in 2004, followed by stricter drunk driving laws. More recently, unemployment, renewed emigration and an increase in taxes because of the financial crisis have hampered pub business.

Things will only get worse. All Irish workers, starting this month, have to surrender up to 10 percent of their wages to fund Ireland’s international bailout.

Dan Danaher was in The Old Mill Bar on the night it closed, Nov. 5, 2010. By then the staff had dwindled to five as trade had fallen off. He said that as a few people shed tears that night, owner Kathleen Sciascia said, “People can’t afford to go out and eat and drink as much as before. If we kept going it would have got worse.”

Village community chairman Mick Murtagh described it as the end of an era.

“The survival of villages like O’Briensbridge is a big issue,” he warned. “People are bypassing local shops to buy cheaper goods in large supermarkets in Limerick. It’s something that we are all guilty of.”

In the city of Limerick 9 miles to the south, Gordon Kearney, director of Rooney auctioneers, which is handling the sale of The Old Mill, agreed that in all pubs “trade has diminished somewhat.”

The firm once handled the sale of 20-30 pubs a year, he said, but sold only three last year, partly because the banks are not making loans to prospective buyers.

In the traditional Irish pub, one could find farmers nursing a pint of Guinness at the bar while discussing sports and the weather, and young people in wood-paneled booths enjoying craic, or good conversation, over glasses of beer.

The loss of the traditional low-key pub now threatens Irish identity, writes American author Bill Barich in his 2010 book, “A Pint of Plain.”

Now a resident of Ireland, Barich complains that many pubs are lifeless museum pieces or sports bars broadcasting television commentary all day.

While the number of bar licenses in the Republic of Ireland has fallen from 8,922 to 7,616 since 2005, the Irish are not drinking less, according to the Drinks Industry Group of Ireland. Sales of alcohol increased by 6 percent in the first half of last year but sales over the bar counter fell by 15 percent.

Below-cost selling by supermarkets is chiefly to blame, said Gerry Mellett, president of the Vintners Federation of Ireland in the Irish Times.

“It is no exaggeration,” he said, “to say that the closure of rural pubs in particular is having a devastating effect on the fabric of life in rural Ireland.”

Anyone who visits O’Briensbridge today will see that he is not exaggerating.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/ireland/110201/irish-pubs-bars-close

Ireland's former richest person declared bankrupt

DUBLIN (AP) -- A famed entrepreneur who was once rated Ireland's richest person was declared bankrupt Monday as a bank pursues him for debts exceeding euro2.1 billion ($2.7 billion).

Lawyers for tycoon Sean Quinn withdrew his opposition to a Republic of Ireland bankruptcy order sought by the former Anglo Irish Bank, the reckless lender at the center of Ireland's calamitous property crash.

The bankruptcy judgment will force a thorough court investigation of Quinn's finances, which the bank hopes will reveal capital and assets that it can reclaim from Quinn, his wife and five children.

Quinn, 64, didn't attend Monday's court hearing. He issued a statement accusing the bank of pursuing "a personal vendetta" and declaring that the "judgment in no way improves Anglo's prospects of recovering money for the taxpayer."

Quinn had a reported 2007 net worth of euro4.7 billion ($6 billion) but sank much of his fortune into Anglo months before the bank — the most aggressive lender to Ireland's construction barons — suffered crippling losses as the country's decade-long property bubble burst.

The Quinn family secretly built up to a 28 percent stake in Anglo shares using an ill-regulated financial instrument that hid the scale of their investment from other stockholders. As Anglo's share price plunged, Quinn says the bank encouraged his family to borrow hundreds of millions specifically to buy more Anglo stock, a charge the bank denies.

Ireland nationalized Anglo in 2009 to prevent its collapse, wiping out a Quinn family investment estimated at euro2.8 billion. The government last year renamed Anglo as the Irish Bank Resolution Corp., or IBRC. Its bailout is expected to cost taxpayers euro29 billion, a bill so great it overwhelmed Ireland's finances and forced the government last year to negotiate a humiliating loan pact with the European Union and International Monetary Fund.

Dublin Commercial Court Justice Elizabeth Dunne told Quinn's lawyer Gavin Simons that Quinn would have to appear in person in coming days to provide documents showing how much he's worth today.

Last week Quinn lost a Belfast legal battle to retain bankruptcy protection in the neighboring British territory of Northern Ireland. The judge there ruled that Quinn had misled a previous Belfast court that his main base of business was in Northern Ireland, rather than the Republic of Ireland.

"I never done a day's work from southern Ireland in my life," Quinn, who has lived for decades in the Republic of Ireland, insisted to reporters outside the Belfast court last week.

Dublin-based IBRC would have faced greater difficulty pursuing Quinn for debts in Northern Ireland. Quinn also could have returned to business within a year under U.K. bankruptcy law, whereas the Irish prevent bankrupts from holding company directorships for up to 12 years.

Quinn said the tougher Irish rules meant he would be too old — 76 in the year 2024 — to direct any new companies then.

"Anglo achieved their goal of ensuring that I will never create another job," he said of Monday's judgment.

Quinn boasts one of Ireland's most celebrated rags-to-riches stories. He grew up on a border farm in Northern Ireland's County Fermanagh, left school barely literate at 14 and started his first construction-gravel business with a 100-pound ($150) bank loan.

Within three decades Quinn had transformed his quarry into a nationwide cement company. He built and bought luxury hotels, pubs, apartment complexes and commercial properties throughout Ireland, Britain, Eastern Europe and Asia; founded Ireland's third-largest insurance company; and took interests in glassworks, packaging and radiators.

In April 2011, IBRC seized ownership of his Irish-based Quinn Group, forced him and relatives off the board, and sold a majority stake in his insurance company to U.S. insurance company Liberty Mutual. In November, shortly after Quinn had secured a surprise bankruptcy-protection order in Belfast, the bank won Dublin court judgments totaling euro2.16 billion ($2.7 billion) against Quinn.

A November affidavit from Quinn recorded he had less than euro11,000 ($15,000) in cash in three bank accounts.

But the Quinns and IBRC are locked in several legal battles stretching from the British Virgin Islands to Cyprus over control of a commercial property empire spanning Britain, Russia, Ukraine, Turkey and India valued at more than euro700 million.

The bank accuses Quinn of fraudulently shifting ownership of his foreign properties, including office blocks and shopping malls, to relatives and shell companies that remain under the Quinns' surreptitious control. The Quinns deny these charges.

His five children have filed a Dublin lawsuit against IBRC seeking to have the bulk of the family's Anglo borrowing voided on the grounds that the bank should never have lent them the money in the first place. They also are seeking to have IBRC return businesses to their ownership that were seized in April 2011.