Brewery cost increases are pushing Galway publicans to call time on the €5 pint – with a warning that €6 stout could become the norm in rural pubs within a couple of years.

The €5 pint of Guinness has all but vanished in Galway City since the cost-of-living crisis sent costs soaring but the latest increase by Diageo Ireland has piled pressure on publicans in the county to put up the price of a pint too.

And the Galway leader of the publicans’ representative group has warned that rural parts of the West of Ireland could become like Wales after the Tories took on the coal miners in the eighties.

“I can see what happened in Wales under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s with the closure of the collieries happening to the West of Ireland – you will travel 25 miles for a pint of milk, a pint of porter, a newspaper, a bar of chocolate. You see it across all the villages, especially in the West, where we don’t have the density of population,” said Joe Sheridan, Chair of the County Galway Vintners (VFI) representing over 400 businesses.

Get the full story in this week’s Connacht Tribune, on sale in shops now, or you can download the digital edition from www.connachttribune.ie. You can also download our Connacht Tribune App from Apple’s App Store or get the Android Version from Google Play.