Is ireland owned by the booze companies ?

[FF/FG/Lab/SF..stitchup]

On the one hand, its a free country. If you choose to drink yourself to death, that is your own choice. And we do not live in a nanny State which dictates to all and sundry what they may or may not do. On the other hand, maybe your drinking is detrimental to the welfare of others.

However, International statistics for alcohol consumption are rather damning. The stereotype of the drunken Paddy does have some credence.

what are your thoughts on the following :

- booze being for sale at 10:30 in the morning with numerous characters in my local knocking back pints every morning, while i have my coffee.
- the ubiquity of drink at every activity (theatre, sports events, political rally's, the Dáil etc)
- weekend evenings in our towns resembling a zombie movie
- glamorous sexy models on the telly doing booze ads
- Government Budget day consistently failing to put serious taxes on drink.
- kids 'knacker drinking' in the park where you walk your dog
- wino's begging with a paper cup in one hand and a can of cider in the other.
- drink-driving and the level of policing thereof.
- the financial cost of healthcare.
- anti-social behaviour on public transport (including airplanes).
- the horror stories on Male life expectancy in places like Russia.
- industrial accidents
- questions of sexual consent the morning after the boozy night before.
- family breakdown (including death) due to alcohol consumption
- longterm welfare dependence correlating with alcohol dependence
- violent crime
- other nationalities do ethnic restaurants, the irish export the 'irish pub'.
- the top tourist attraction in ireland is a brewery (which sided with the British in 1916)
- sport spectacles are sponsored by booze companies
- disease, mental health, morbidity.
- births, deaths, marriages, graduations, Tuesday evenings.....all are a special occasion.
- alcohol 'minimum pricing' introduction seems to be taking forever to happen.
- infant foetal alcohol syndrome and the devastating effects upon a new life
- international comparisons of how other countries deal with alcohol.
- junior Cert results day and the associated madness.
- the minimum age to purchase alcohol in ireland is young compared to much of the US. Allied to dodgy I.D, my local pub is full of drunken kids.
- the ugliness of a nation of binge drinkers. Big belly, puffy face, stinky breath....is this the Ireland the 1916 rebels fought for ?
- I will confess to being shocked at pretty women aged in their 40's in Italy, Spain and even parts of the UK compared to 40-something irish women. Are our Cailin's ageing prematurely due to a drunken Rock n roll lifestyle ?
- Our Christmas Covid performance has accelerated us to the top of the World league table in January for cases. Surely alcohol has played a big part ?

The Pioneer temperance movement is now largely associated with elderly's of a religious persuasion. The dictates of Islam on alcohol are well understood. The visits of Reagan and Obama to ireland involved the compulsory pint of plain, to the guffawing of the public. Trump is Teetotal, as is Putin. Bertie Ahern was slurring his words on an early morning radio interview. Cowan liked a pint. A drunken President Nixon ordered Kissinger to nuke Vietnam - and could not remember the conversation the following morning. Alan Shatter had a disagreement with the Gardai when they stopped his car one evening. A routine drink-driving test and the newspapers report that the records have gone missing.

Has booze got a control over us that prevents us reaching our full potential ? Forget about Prohibition, that was a failure in the USA. But what about a measure of moderation ?


What other thoughts ?

 

[Tadhg Gaelach]

Ireland is owned by anyone with the money to buy our venial and corrupt politicians.

 

[Olli Rehn]

The boozing class owns the drinking industry- without it it would not exist!

 

[Napper Tandy]

- booze being for sale at 10:30 in the morning with numerous characters in my local knocking back pints every morning, while i have my coffee.


What other thoughts ?

Don’t go to bars if you feel so offended

 

[FF/FG/Lab/SF..stitchup]

surprised by the apathy to this subject. You all suffering from a hangover and too tired to opine ?

Over 80% of Irish adults drink alcohol, and the rate is set to increase
.
Irish remain among heaviest drinkers in the world as global alcohol consumption rises


''the irish are among the heaviest drinkers in the world''

 

[parentheses]

Booze and cigs definitely bad habits.

A pack of cigs is now 12.70 so a smoking habit can have a real financial impact not to mention the health impact.

 

[TheWexfordInn]

Booze and cigs definitely bad habits.

A pack of cigs is now 12.70 so a smoking habit can have a real financial impact not to mention the health impact.

Is it just me or does hardly anyone smoke any more? I hardly ever see anyone smoking in everyday life. There are I believe 4 smokers among the 120 off employees in the Office I work in that smoke. None of the people I meet in the pub smoke.
I read that 15 per cent of people smoke, if so there must be some locations or some groups where there is a high rate of smoking.

 

[Generation Snowflake]

The drug isnt the issue, society is. There is a massive increase in people snorting coke from what i can see among the younger generations, the way we allow our country to be run by foreigners is whats wrong here.
We live in a sick society, and i think a large part of this is Ireland is owned by multiple mega corporations, which should never have been allowed to get as big as they are or allowed into our market. Because of how big they are they have massive amounts of money to lobby and bribe their way past all opposition to what they want, which is market domination and profits.

There is a big issue throughout the west of consolidation.

Consolidation (business), the mergers or acquisitions of many smaller companies into much larger ones

The Recent Consolidation in the Beverage Sector

Consolidation continues to wash away the number of brewers in the global beer market. The largest brewers in the world have adopted the mindset that bigger is better over the past decade. As a result, four megabreweries have emerged that account for nearly half of the world’s beer sales and have...

www.valueline.com

Consolidation continues to wash away the number of brewing companies in the global beer market as the largest brewers in the world have adopted the mindset that bigger is better over the past decade. As a result, four megabreweries (Anheuser Busch InBev (BUD), SAB Miller, Heineken International, and Molson Coors (TAP)) have emerged and account for roughly half of the world’s beer sales. Certain developments have spurred this consolidation and, consequently, the rise of these four goliaths. Most notably, the infiltration of small-batch craft beers into local markets and the rising popularity of wine and spirits have led the megabreweries to search for ways to increase their volumes. What’s more, by tacking on smaller operations, these brewers create economies of scale, which offer cost advantages (costs go down as scale increase) that are tough for their craft competitors to replicate.

The best way to understand how consolidation has affected the beer business is to take a look at some of the largest acquisitions in recent years. One of the best examples is the creation of Anheuser-Busch InBev. It started with Belgian brewer Interbrew which gained control of the Latin American outfit AmBev to form InBev in 2004. The combined entity was the world’s largest brewing operation. Over the next few years, InBev continued to add other smaller breweries to its business. Then, in 2008, it made headlines with its acquisition of one of America’s most renowned businesses, Anheuser Busch. This deal created Anheuser Busch InBev, which further cemented this entity’s position as the worldwide market leader.

Face book is no different.

Opinion | It’s Time to Break Up Facebook (Published 2019)

Mark Zuckerberg is a good guy. But the company I helped him build is a threat to our economy and democracy.

www.nytimes.com

America was built on the idea that power should not be concentrated in any one person, because we are all fallible. That’s why the founders created a system of checks and balances. They didn’t need to foresee the rise of Facebook to understand the threat that gargantuan companies would pose to democracy. Jefferson and Madison were voracious readers of Adam Smith, who believed that monopolies prevent the competition that spurs innovation and leads to economic growth.

A century later, in response to the rise of the oil, railroad and banking trusts of the Gilded Age, the Ohio Republican John Sherman said on the floor of Congress: “If we will not endure a king as a political power, we should not endure a king over the production, transportation and sale of any of the necessities of life. If we would not submit to an emperor, we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.” The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 outlawed monopolies. More legislation followed in the 20th century, creating legal and regulatory structures to promote competition and hold the biggest companies accountable. The Department of Justice broke up monopolies like Standard Oil and AT&T.

For many people today, it’s hard to imagine government doing much of anything right, let alone breaking up a company like Facebook. This isn’t by coincidence.

Starting in the 1970s, a small but dedicated group of economists, lawyers and policymakers sowed the seeds of our cynicism. Over the next 40 years, they financed a network of think tanks, journals, social clubs, academic centers and media outlets to teach an emerging generation that private interests should take precedence over public ones. Their gospel was simple: “Free” markets are dynamic and productive, while government is bureaucratic and ineffective. By the mid-1980s, they had largely managed to relegate energetic antitrust enforcement to the history books.

This shift, combined with business-friendly tax and regulatory policy, ushered in a period of mergers and acquisitions that created megacorporations. In the past 20 years, more than 75 percent of American industries, from airlines to pharmaceuticals, have experienced increased concentration, and the average size of public companies has tripled. The results are a decline in entrepreneurship, stalled productivity growth, and higher prices and fewer choices for consumers.

The same thing is happening in social media and digital communications. Because Facebook so dominates social networking, it faces no market-based accountability. This means that every time Facebook messes up, we repeat an exhausting pattern: first outrage, then disappointment and, finally, resignation.

In Japan and South Korea they have mega corporations that are still under the umbrella of these countries, but they dominate the business cycle where the smaller companies have to feed into them or else will end up swept aside, but they still act in the general interests of the country.

We have little of this left out side our agriculture like Glanbia. As in our own brands are no longer Irish, and are instead owned by foreigners and their stock holders. The end result being you are a country that at best is to be used for the import and export of labour depending on how corporation x decides what it wants your politicians to do.

Either way globalism brings dystopia as a default, and people will look to escape from it in any way they can, eg. drink/drug themselves to sleep.
And the corrupt state would be stupid to say otherwise, as it is a great way to keep the people down.

Smoke, Drink and Eat What You Want, Norway’s Public Health Minister Says (Published 2019)

The new minister, from a right-wing, anti-immigration party, told an interviewer that people knew what was healthy and she would not be the “moral police.”

www.nytimes.com

It was a most unusual message from a health official: People should be allowed to eat, drink and smoke as they see fit.

Norway’s new minister in charge of public health said this week that adults did not need government lectures about what to put in their bodies, but it sounded a bit like she was telling people to go ahead and indulge. Critics protested that her remarks were damaging, particularly coming from someone in her position.

“I think people should be allowed to smoke, drink and eat as much red meat as they like,” Sylvi Listhaug, the government’s minister for the elderly and public health, said in an interview posted on Monday on the website of NRK, Norway’s state broadcaster. “The government may provide information, but I think people in general know what is healthy and what is not.”

For whatever reasons the above is an interesting message being sent by Norway, but may be just a reaction against the push for the nanny state as the norm.

 

[jpc]

On the one hand, its a free country. If you choose to drink yourself to death, that is your own choice. And we do not live in a nanny State which dictates to all and sundry what they may or may not do. On the other hand, maybe your drinking is detrimental to the welfare of others.

However, International statistics for alcohol consumption are rather damning. The stereotype of the drunken Paddy does have some credence.

what are your thoughts on the following :

- booze being for sale at 10:30 in the morning with numerous characters in my local knocking back pints every morning, while i have my coffee.
- the ubiquity of drink at every activity (theatre, sports events, political rally's, the Dáil etc)
- weekend evenings in our towns resembling a zombie movie
- glamorous sexy models on the telly doing booze ads
- Government Budget day consistently failing to put serious taxes on drink.
- kids 'knacker drinking' in the park where you walk your dog
- wino's begging with a paper cup in one hand and a can of cider in the other.
- drink-driving and the level of policing thereof.
- the financial cost of healthcare.
- anti-social behaviour on public transport (including airplanes).
- the horror stories on Male life expectancy in places like Russia.
- industrial accidents
- questions of sexual consent the morning after the boozy night before.
- family breakdown (including death) due to alcohol consumption
- longterm welfare dependence correlating with alcohol dependence
- violent crime
- other nationalities do ethnic restaurants, the irish export the 'irish pub'.
- the top tourist attraction in ireland is a brewery (which sided with the British in 1916)
- sport spectacles are sponsored by booze companies
- disease, mental health, morbidity.
- births, deaths, marriages, graduations, Tuesday evenings.....all are a special occasion.
- alcohol 'minimum pricing' introduction seems to be taking forever to happen.
- infant foetal alcohol syndrome and the devastating effects upon a new life
- international comparisons of how other countries deal with alcohol.
- junior Cert results day and the associated madness.
- the minimum age to purchase alcohol in ireland is young compared to much of the US. Allied to dodgy I.D, my local pub is full of drunken kids.
- the ugliness of a nation of binge drinkers. Big belly, puffy face, stinky breath....is this the Ireland the 1916 rebels fought for ?

The Pioneer temperance movement is now largely associated with elderly's of a religious persuasion. The dictates of Islam on alcohol are well understood. The visits of Reagan and Obama to ireland involved the compulsory pint of plain, to the guffawing of the public. Trump is Teetotal, as is Putin. Bertie Ahern was slurring his words on an early morning radio interview. Cowan liked a pint. A drunken President Nixon ordered Kissinger to nuke Vietnam - and could not remember the conversation the following morning. Alan Shatter had a disagreement with the Gardai when they stopped his car one evening. A routine drink-driving test and the newspapers report that the records have gone missing.

Has booze got a control over us that prevents us reaching our full potential ? Forget about Prohibition, that was a failure in the USA. But what about a measure of moderation ?


What other thoughts ?

We have some of the highest taxes and duties on alcohol in the world.
The actual sales in terms of vat receipts have dropped since the start of the century.
A more accurate statement given the tax take,
"Is the alcohol industry owned by the government for revenue generation?"

 

[jpc]

surprised by the apathy to this subject. You all suffering from a hangover and too tired to opine ?

Over 80% of Irish adults drink alcohol, and the rate is set to increase
.
Irish remain among heaviest drinkers in the world as global alcohol consumption rises


''the irish are among the heaviest drinkers in the world''

Ok a reaction.
Lazy soundbites from gimp journalism interns.

 

[Ire-land]

surprised by the apathy to this subject. You all suffering from a hangover and too tired to opine ?

Over 80% of Irish adults drink alcohol, and the rate is set to increase
.
Irish remain among heaviest drinkers in the world as global alcohol consumption rises


''the irish are among the heaviest drinkers in the world''

I’ve often said that this country would only rise up in revolution if they closed the pubs and the off licenses.

Getting trampled on and destroyed as a people means nothing anymore.

 

[Ted]

This morning I wanted to buy a bottle of wine for my Sunday lunch.
"Sorry Sir, we can't sell you alcohol until after 12:30".

Ffs! What a nanny state!

The Irish behave like irresponsible children around alcohol because they're treated like irresponsible children.