What's Wrong With A Festival Sponsored By A Drinks Company?

There are times when you wonder at out national capacity for self-flaggelation. I don’t know if it is part of what we are. Or if it is essentially a media driven thing. But Irish people have always had a knack for knocking things.

Begrudgery is an ancient Irish sport. It may seem to have its uses on occasion, if someone suddenly starts acting like the lord of the manor. But more often than not, it is a profoundly negative influence that serves only to allow those who don’t, to undermine those who do. And it is also a substitute for positive political action. In short, apart from providing a few cheap laughs, it does no one any good.
In Australia, they call it tall poppy syndrome: if you rise up, there is always someone waiting to cut you down. Here, we talk about putting your head above the parapet. If you do, there is a risk that it will be chopped off. The implicit message is: don’t attempt to do anything original, new or enterprising. Because if you do, you’ll be dragged back down in jig time. Or worse, the gathering mob will consciously try to bury you. There are lots of good things about being Irish but this occasional penchant for vindictiveness is not one of them.
There was, it seemed to me, an element of self-flaggelation about the ruckus that developed on the run-up to Arthur’s Day. There were moments during the debate – if that is the right word – when you’d have thought someone had committed some kind of crime against humanity. People were getting extraordinarily emotional. There was an element of ‘how dare they?’ about it. ‘The cheek of them, trying to convince us that the man who invented Guinness was some kind of national hero’...
Inevitably, it was slung around as an insult that this was all about marketing. And, as the argument gained momentum, people who work for Diageo were increasingly demonised as a collection of traitors to the Irish people, accused of leading them into temptation and then washing their hands of the consequences.
In the middle of it all, I found myself asking: is there anywhere else in the western world that something as essentially uncontroversial as a festival sponsored by a drinks company could become an even bigger item on the news than a referendum to change the constitution or the civil war in Syria?
As it happens, Hot Press has been involved as a partner in Arthur’s Day since its inception. On the one hand that means that we have a vested interest of sorts in the event. It is a significant source of advertising revenue. But it also means that we have worked closely with the people in Diageo who are directly involved in making the event happen, and with their colleagues in the PR, advertising and marketing companies that activate the campaign around Arthur’s Day.
Do these individuals deserve to be demonised? Not for one minute.
I speak from experience when I say that Hot Press has had to work along the way with organisations where the culture smacked of arrogance and cynicism – and it is not pleasant. In contrast, the workers in Diageo with whom we have dealt – and there is a long list of them – have consistently impressed me and the rest of the staff here as being uncommonly decent, positive and genuinely motivated. From what I have seen, the culture in the organisation is an impressive one, with an emphasis on keeping things personal and treating the people they are dealing with well.
Of course Diageo is a multi-national corporation. Like every other publicly traded company, the over-riding motive is to maximise profits. And the staff have to be tough to survive there. To imagine otherwise would be silly. But without fear of contradiction, I can say that, in Hot Press’ experience, the staff in marketing and promotion in Diageo, whether in Dublin or in London, have a very constructive and healthy attitude to the business. They really want to do good things. And they are energised, individually and collectively, by the thought that they might be able to turn the marketing of Guinness into something that supports creativity – as they set out to do this year in particular with widening of the remit of the Arthur Guinness Projects.
And what about Arthur’s Day itself? Is it some kind of national travesty? An insult to the integrity of the Irish people? Or is it an opportunity to see some of the biggest acts in music in a close-up and personal setting that is good for musicians, good for pubs and good for music fans – and by extension for the country?
For a start, whoever dreamed it up, it was and is a brilliant marketing initiative. Anyone who has ever tried, needed or wanted to sell anything knows that coming up with the kind of bright ideas that capture the public imagination is not easy. And anyone who does so deserves a round of applause.
There’s hardly a band in the world that isn’t trying to figure out ways of getting the biggest possible number of people to shell out decent dosh for what they have to sell – whether it’s albums, downloads, t-shirts or button badges. The same goes for brands. To one degree or another, everyone wants to prosper and to do that you have to sell.
Of course if you don’t like the thought of Arthur’s Day, then that’s okay. No one is forcing you or anyone else to participate. And you are perfectly entitled to shout about it if you want. It’s a free country. But of this there can be no doubt: a lot of musicians and bands benefit directly from the festival. So do the owners of hundreds of pubs all over Ireland. And in a time of economic peril, when pubs and bars are under threat of closure, and those who work there are in danger of losing their jobs, so too do the workers and staff.
In any event, since when was it a crime to have a good time? Have we lost our sense of fun entirely?
Actually no. In the long run, on September 26, the people voted with their feet. The atmosphere in the centre of Dublin and elsewhere around the country on the night was buzzing. Far more people than normal were out to enjoy themselves. Some of them caught a clatter of big stars in the kind of setting you’d never otherwise see them. Others sang, jived and talked their way through a night of high conviviality. Suggestions that the A&E departments would be working overtime proved to be completely off the mark. There were very few casualties: no more – and probably in truth a lot less – than there would be after any major sporting event or music festival.
Underlying all of this, there is of course the question of Irish people’s relationship with alcohol.
As I understand it, everyone is agreed that it is important to educate people to manage their intake. Is it possible to drink responsibly? Of course it is. Despite what was said during the course of the debate, hundreds of thousands of people here do.
Do we really drink more than anyone else in the world as is so often claimed? Wikipedia isn’t always right, but they have us in 15th place, with lots of Eastern European countries ahead of us and France just behind – which sounds about right. In fact, over the past 10 years, Ireland’s per capita consumption of alcohol has been distorted upwards by the high number of immigrants fromEastern Europe in their 20s who have been living here – whose consumption of alcohol, like that of the Irish emigrants in Britain and the US in the 1950s, is way above the norm. But the anti-alcohol lobby could never acknowledge something as simple and as obvious as this. They’d prefer to paint Irish people in the worst possible light.
The high point in people’s consumption of alcohol is in their mid to late 20s. After that the majority slow down and take it easier. It isn’t a big mystery. But as in so many respects, the agencies that compile the figures here are agenda-driven and as a result consistently fail to take all of the relevant factors into account and – knowingly I suspect – present a distorted picture which inflates the problem.
We cannot afford to be complacent. The impact that addiction to alcohol has on the lives of the people it affects is appalling. So is the impact of addiction to drugs – from various prescription drugs to heroin. Similarly, the addiction to gambling. It is addiction that is the issue, not alcohol.
Does anyone seriously believe that addiction will be minimised even in the slightest by ever greater impositions of nanny state-ism on consenting Irish adults? We have argued consistently in Hot Press for the liberalising of the laws in relation to sex, to drugs and to other areas of personal choice. In the same spirit, we can do without a failed prohibitionist mentality being further extended into how we approach our consumption of alcohol.
If you try hard enough you can find reasons to ban the advertising of anything and everything – from soft drinks to chocolate bars to extreme sports to bookies to banks. It is all nonsense. In the end the working assumption has to be that we are intelligent creatures, who have to be capable of standing up on our own hind legs and deciding for ourselves: I will not eat or drink or bet too much.
Some people find that incredibly tough and they deserve all our help and support in fighting addiction. But that is not the basis for framing universal public policy. It never has been. And it never will be...