Irish pubs: drinkers beware - FT.com When money's tight and hard to get And your horse has also ran, When all you have is a heap of debt - A pint of plain is your only man. Where is Flann O'Brien now that we need him? The Irish writer made the pithy observation above in the 1930s. He might have been writing about modern Ireland. News came this week that the famous Irish pub is in trouble. There are fewer of them every year, they have accumulated debt of €2bn, their revenue has declined by a third in the past five years and the economy may not sustain the 7,400 pubs that remain. Something must be done! The decline of the pub is not limited to Ireland. The UK's Good Pub Guide 2014, published this week, suggested that 4,000 British pubs will close in the next year. They will be the pubs still "stuck in the 1980s," it said. Put like that, those pubs will not be missed, nor their awful food, sticky tables and generic lager. But let's avoid a metropolitan bias. There is nothing more local than, well, the local. That special quality needs to be nurtured at all costs. Ireland's problem looks structural. Some 90 per cent of Irish pubs are owned by families and many have been at the crossroads or on the high street in village, town and city for generations. But the financial crisis is taking a ferocious toll, on top of a smoking ban and a (very belated) crackdown on drinking and driving. Each pub has an average €270,000 of debt. That does not look high. But, like some Irish families, some pubs will struggle to repay. The relationship between publicans and politicians in Ireland has always been too close for comfort. As the country comes to terms with its mountain of private debt, there must be no hint of special measures to help the sector. What Ireland's pubs need is a revolution akin to what is happening in the UK and the US - a flourishing independent brewing sector and communities banding together to purchase their locals from pub companies more interested in property values than pints. A properly pulled pint of Guinness is one of Ireland's gifts to the world. But it is not enough by itself to guarantee the future of a sector badly in need of a modernising jolt.