Celebrating the Great Ulster Pub
Gareth Stewart, Cool FM presenter; Colin Neill, CEO of Pubs of Ulster; Miss Northern Ireland, Meagan Green; Gary Myles, Downtown radio presenter and Mark Stewart, Pubs of Ulster chairman check out the action at Bob Stewart’s pub, Drumbeg for the launch of The Great Ulster Pub Week recently.
The Pubs of Ulster trade body has launched a new initiative that it hopes will showcase the big contribution which pubs make to social and economic life of the province.
The Great Ulster Pub Week, which takes place between May 1 and 9 will be the biggest pub-centric multi-venue event seen in Northern Ireland and it will recognise and showcase the value of our local bars for the contribution they make to the economy and the vital role they play in the communities they serve.
With more than 140 pubs across Northern Ireland already signed up and more expected to join the line-up as the date approaches, The Great Ulster Pub Week will feature hundreds of unique events showcasing great food, great entertainment and great craic.
From live music to magic; pub quizzes to arts, crafts, charity challenges and much more besides, bars across Northern Ireland will be showing their best side with a packed programme of hundreds of events this May.
The Great Ulster Pub Week gets underway in style on Thursday, May 1 with a Guinness World Record attempt to stage the world’s largest simultaneous multi-venue pub quiz in association with Downtown Radio. The attempt, which will see registered pubs across the country take part in a live pub quiz on Downtown Radio, aims to beat the current record of 2,679 participants in 39 venues.
PoU chief executive, Colin Neill, believes that the licensed trade is a vital part of the fabric of life in Northern Ireland because it employs 35,000 people and contributes £1bn annually to the local economy.
Speaking recently, he pointed out that PoU has committed significant resources to create The Great Ulster Pub Week initiative because it believed the campaign would help equip publicans across Northern Ireland with the inspiration, ideas and resources they need to drive footfall into their premises:
“Pubs are no longer just about alcohol, trade in licensed premises is increasingly focused around great quality food, entertainment and events”, he told LCN. “The Great Ulster Pub Week will showcase all of this and more; giving people a reason to return to their local pub and, we hope, inspiring publicans to think differently about their businesses.”
As well as offering consumers nine days and nights of innovative and exciting events, The Great Ulster Pub Week will be used as an opportunity to up-skill publicans and raise industry standards.
Each pub participating in Pub Week will undergo training in social media and be offered World Host Customer Service Training, which aims to give businesses in the tourism and hospitality sectors a competitive edge by providing them with comprehensive training in the importance of excellent customer service and effective communication.
It is hoped that The Great Ulster Pub Week’s packed programme of innovative and exciting events will drive footfall into local pubs and create a lasting legacy for growth, assisting publicans in their efforts to meet changing consumer demands. The initiative also aims to educate consumers to understand the valuable role pubs play in the social and cultural fabric of life in Northern Ireland.
Mark Stewart, chairman of Pubs of Ulster says that whether a pub is in the country or the heart of a city, it plays a vital economic and social role on which The Great Ulster Pub Week has been designed to build:
“It’s not just the regulars who treasure our pubs, tourists rate our pubs as one of the best attractions and experiences in Northern Ireland,” he adds. “In fact, pubs are the largest grossing tourism sector in Northern Ireland with almost 80 per cent of all tourists visiting a pub and almost 70 per cent eating in one. They create a warm welcoming atmosphere and provide the perfect place to meet with old friends and make new ones.”
Arty offerings at The John Hewitt
Among those who have already embraced the Great Ulster Pub Week initiative is Gerry White, manager of The John Hewitt bar in Cathedral Quarter, Belfast.
His busy venue is already well known as a centre for live music and arts-related events, but Gerry has added three great events to his normal programme in order to help celebrate Pub Week.
On Saturday, May 3, Leicester singer-songwriter, Grace Petrie, will be playing at The John Hewitt from 8pm and admission to the event will be free.
The following evening, the bar will host a performance of Ken McElroy’s play, The Rare Oul Times. In the play, the action takes place in John Ryan’s famous Bailey Pub in Duke Street, Dublin, where the audience are on-lookers as two of Irelands most outrageous and notorious drinkers and literary figures, Brendan Behan and Patrick Kavanagh, discuss their successes, failures and love lives to date in 1950’s Dublin. The performance gets underway at 2pm on Sunday and admission will cost £3.
And on May 7, at 9pm, there will be a screening of Good Vibrations, which tells the story of legendary Belfast record shop-owner, Terri Hooley. The film will be shown in ‘Hooley-vision’ – in other words, everyone who attends will be issued with an eye-patch! And numbers are limited to 100, so get there early. Admission will be free.
Gerry – who attended the recent launch of Pub Week at Café Vaudeville – is completely behind the initiative:
“The whole idea is to show the pub as a place where lots of things are going on and not just somewhere that you go to drink. We have a busy programme down here all the time anyway, but for those pubs that perhaps don’t do so much, this is a good way of getting them to try something different,” he said. “If they do get involved, hopefully they will see their footfall increasing as a result and perhaps they will change the way they do things.”
