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Ireland's Cabinet is mulling whether to impose minimum price controls on alcoholic beverages and restrictions on advertising and event sponsorship in a country where Guinness' name adorns everything from sports jerseys to rail bridges. Guinness also brews several other European and American beer brands in Dublin. Guinness says it's keeping an open mind on changing Arthur's Day next year to focus less on pubs and pints, and more on the arts, but insists nobody's being forced to drink when watching musical performances. The Irish corporate relations director of Diageo, Peter O'Brien, said his own sister is a nurse and he understands fully how alcohol abuse strains Ireland's emergency services at night. "As we've lived through austerity, and we've had a real change in society, we've started to question our relationship with everything: the (Catholic) church, big business, politicians. And we're questioning our relationship with alcohol," O'Brien said. But he said Guinness, as the country's dominant brewer, still needed to do more to promote the pub as a center of Irish life and tourism. He noted a report published this week by the Drinks Industry Group of Ireland
-- a lobbying group of which he is chairman -- found that, since Ireland's economy went bust in 2008, Ireland's pubs had shrunk by nearly 1,000 and employed 17 percent fewer people. Ireland's Royal College of Physicians has appealed for a public boycott of Arthur's Day and says Diageo is contributing to a doubling of deaths by liver disease since 1995. "We have a progressively worsening relationship with alcohol in Ireland," said Dr. Stephen Stewart, director of the Liver Disease Center in Dublin's Mater Hospital, where he regularly sees patients in their 30s facing life-threatening liver failure.
But some say the critics have picked a conveniently easy target in Guinness
-- when it's really Ireland that needs to look in the mirror. "There's an alco-holiday happening all the time in Ireland," said Paddy Cullivan, a Dublin musician and satirist. "It's called Friday and Saturday night." ___ Online: Arthur's Day events: Alcohol Action Ireland: Christy Moore singing "Arthur's Day": Waterboys' "Song for Arthur's Day":
http://www.guinness.com/
en-ie/arthursday/locator.html
http://alcoholireland.ie/category/home-news/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v9YvvGYhlgTk
https://soundcloud.com/mickpuck/arthurs-day/
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