Editor’s note: Is anyone drinking Guinness in Ireland anymore? This important news story hit the wires earlier in the week, in anticipation of Saint Patrick’s Day. So what’s the deal and can Ireland survive? NRO asked some experts.

Jim Geraghty

Paraphrased from the appropriately-named-for-the-occasion On Tap:

The headline screams crisis, but the story tells a different story:
Taste for Guinness wanes in changing Ireland
But in the story, we learn, the Irish are still drinking (not quite shocking news there) but they’re diversifying their palette – trying other beers and ciders, and drinking more wine. Look, I like Guinness, it’s my drink of choice when it’s on tap, but the fact that the Irish are trying beers besides Guinness is not the death-knell for this iconic brand and national symbol. In fact, the last time I was in Dublin, the best place I went to was Porterhouse Brewery, which doesn’t serve Guinness; they serve their own selection of about a dozen microbrews.

I’ll give the Crunchy Cons a shot glass worth of credit — small, local, and recently brewed is usually better, particularly when it comes to beer.

– Jim Geraghty reports on the Democratic 2008 field at The Hillary Spot.

Michael Graham

Only Irish coffee provides in a single glass all four essential food groups: alcohol, caffeine, sugar and fat. — Irish food writer Alex Levine.

Forget St. Patrick’s Day — why would we ever drink anything that isn’t Irish?

I am not Irish, nor am I enamored of Celtic culture as a whole. But after discovering the satisfying heft of a morning cup of Irish tea, I abandoned Starbucks forever. After my first Guinness in a Dublin pub, I declared it unfair to the world’s brewers to mention their products in the same breath. (I also discovered that, as legend claims, the Guinness in Ireland really does taste different — raising disturbing questions about the island’s water purification system.)

And then there’s Bushmill’s Irish whiskey…I’m speechless.

When St. Peter buys me my first round at the Pearly Gates Pub, if it’s not Bushmill’s, I’ll be looking for lodgings elsewhere.

I’ve never understood why Irish whiskey isn’t more popular in the U.S. American whiskey is rude and forward. Scotch drinkers themselves admit their peaty brew is an acquired taste. But Irish whiskey is as gentle as the evening breeze and as welcoming as a pub’s open door.

Plus, it’s Irish. Not to horn in on Ann Coulter’s act, but the connection between Irish culture and the delights of fermented libations is hardly obscure. Why wouldn’t my drink of choice come from the world’s choicest drinkers — the Irish?

Irish dance may be a migraine set to music, and Irish cuisine is banned by international treaty from Guantanamo Bay. But when an Irishman orders a drink, my first instinct is to call out “For two — and make mine a double.”

– Boston radio talk host Michael Graham appears weekly on Ireland’s Newstalk radio network.

Chris McEvoy Once upon a time I was walking in New York City beside a real live Irish girl. This girl was the exact thing — a bonafide Colleen from Ireland, the daughter of a cousin of a mother of a friend of mine who had come to the states for the summer. She was unattractive, so at my young age my only interest in her was her Irishness. I had never before been to Ireland and this girl was an original; and I liked how she sounded and when I didn’t look at her she was a mythical Irish beauty.

It was a summer night and we talked and walked for a good while, and she answered that yes, the grass really was that green. The Guinness? “Better back home than here.” And I could just taste it: creamy-topped brown-black Irish Guinness pulled long and slow in a dark thatchy pub. Lip-licking perfect, and not too many steps later I thought it was nice when she asked about my America, a place where we agreed a true Guinness pint was not to be found. “Been yet to California?” “Work in any of these buildings here we’re passin’?” Soon enough we were discussing my living situation, which back then was occasionally at my parents’ house and the rest of the time was elsewhere. I noted that when I was back home in Queens that I slept on the floor in my old bedroom, which had been taken over by my younger brothers who had stolen the beds. “No bed, but I make do,” and as I said this I felt the strong simple Irishman inside me emerge. But I had fouled, apparently badly, and the mythical Irish beauty (when you didn’t look) beside me altered in haunting way.

“You Americans are always complainin’ bout sumthin’, aren’t yeh?” snipped the Hag. “Be thankful y’have space enough for sleepin’ at all.” That savor in my mouth — brought on by the imagined perfectness of the perfect pint in Ireland — vanished. I was a Joycian creature lost in the night, tasting the hollow dryness of anguish and anger.

True Irishmen, to this day I assume, can sleep anywhere — pub floors, behind the dole dispatchery, bogs — and never make a peep about it. And so if they are in fact no longer drinking Guinness in the amounts they used to, I have it on good authority they’re not complainin’.

– Chris McEvoy is executive editor of National Review.

John J. Miller Ireland still has its saint. St. Patrick was a great man, and for Ireland he’s the perfect patron saint. But he isn’t that best patron saint for Irish Americans. That honor belongs to St. Brendan.

– John J. Miller is NR’s national political reporter and the father of boys named Brendan and Patrick.

David Quinn

The main contribution so far to St. Patrick’s Week over here in Ireland has been a good old-fashioned condemnation of it by our best known moral theologian, Fr. Vincent Twomey. Fr. Twomey, who is, let is be added, a former student of Pope Benedict, has described Ireland as “an increasingly secularised and vulgarised country” where “Paddy’s Week is descending into an excuse for mindless alcohol-fuelled revelry.”

Fr. Twomey has been all over the airwaves thanks to his comments which have struck a chord with a lot of people and angered others. The angry ones hate to be told that there is any downside whatsoever to the decline of the Catholic Church. The “alcohol-fuelled revelry” is, for them, a kind of extended celebration of Mother Church’s woes.

Some revelry. We’ve always been famed as champion boozers but alcohol consumption by the Irish is up a whopping 40pc in just ten years. A new study has just confirmed that we are the biggest binge-drinkers in Europe.

The increase in alcohol consumption is explained by three things: increased prosperity; more drinking by women; and more drinking by the young.

But there may be a fourth factor, rarely mentioned, but brought up by Fr. Twomey: namely secularization. The less we believe in God the more we’re abusing alcohol and drugs. Is there a causal connection? Fr. Twomey believes so. I think he’s right. We’ve got to fill that God-shaped hole with something.

– David Quinn is a writer in Ireland.