Oracle wrote:Export? ....
Found this personally rather amusing ....... and relieved they are changing the name!
Irish women vomit like good English girls
By Ed West .... The Daily Telegraph
I'm in Ireland, where, believe it or not, drink is a bit of a problem. That might not seem like breaking news - but what is different is the way that Irish drinking patterns have gone through a weird process of Anglicisation.
The Irish used to drink in inter-generational groups, which has a civilising effect, while female drunkenness was frowned upon, as were overt displays of intoxication.
Now Irish women vomit at bus stops like good English girls, teenagers booze in packs, and alcohol-related violence has rocketed. Drunken Irish football fans even shout in mockney accents picked up from English TV, which carry a certain chav chic.
What the Irish have forgotten is that sobriety is part of their heritage. The 19th-century temperance movement had a nationalist undercurrent. Its slogan, "Ireland sober is Ireland free", was so successful that even now the country has the highest proportion of teetotallers in Europe.
But that is changing. Ireland is now free, rich, drunk and Anglicised: English shops dominate the high street; that oxymoron, English celebrity culture, is everywhere; British tabloids have taken over; English football is the new religion; and Tesco has "pacified" the country way beyond Gladstone's wildest dreams.
This new Anglo-Irishness reflects a self-consciously vulgar New Brit view of the world in which drunkenness is something it never was before - shameless. Irish booze intake trebled between 1960 and 2000; among EU nations, Ireland is behind only Luxembourg, a glorified duty?free shop.
Last week, the Catholic Church launched a counter-attack. Ireland's new cardinal, Dr Seán Brady, the Archbishop of Armagh, put the case well: "One of the great myths in our culture today is the belief that you can only be happy when you can do what you want, when you want, as you want."
Perhaps it was rather unfortunate timing that the Irish dumped Catholicism just as they embraced capitalism. Free-market economics works only when held in check by boring old Christian ideas such as restraint and deferred gratification. Without these, consumerism just leads to suicidal excess or short-term retail therapy. England failed to export Protestantism to the Emerald Isle. It has had far better luck with nihilism.
Still, at least the Irish have never taken to Stella Artois as much as the Brits. Now the Belgian brewers have signalled the end of an era by dropping the "Stella" from its name, as well as introducing a new, lower?strength beer, Peeterman (only four per cent to Stella's 5.2 per cent).
"Wife beater", as Stella is affectionately known, has become so associated with drunken violence that lawyers dealing with assault charges jokingly refer to a "Stella defence".
Stella became a victim of its own success: like Hackett and Burberry, its expensive image attracted the yobs it didn't want to be associated with. For a while, it was happy to take the yob pound, and became the biggest-selling lager during the mid-1990s. But sales fell by five per cent last year. Pub landlords have found that removing the Stella pump has the same effect as playing classical music at train stations - all the idiots leave. The brand took a pre-emptive step in the summer by withdrawing the drink from some downmarket pubs, giving as its official reason that "the pouring ritual is not being observed correctly", as if it were some delicate Japanese tea ceremony.
Of course, it is not Stella's fault that the British cannot handle their drink.
Oracle, did you add the last line yourself?
