There are better ways of warning people about the health issues associated with drinking too much alcohol than enforcing new health labels, a brewer has said.

From May of 2026, Ireland will be the first country in the world to make health warnings mandatory on alcohol bottles or cans.

Plans to introduce these labels could have adverse implications for Irish consumers and producers.

Preliminary designs for the warning labels have begun circulating, with the thoughts of having to label alcohol specifically for Irish consumers providing a worry.

As these labels are unique to Ireland, they must be added either by the producer or the importer.

On Lunchtime Live, Rascals Brewery’s Carl O’Donoghue said the biggest impact for them will be for exporting their products.

“I mean, if everybody in Ireland is doing this, then it'll be a norm here but when we're trying to sell our beer export and there's this big label on it that no one else has in their countries then why would they want to have it when they can choose to buy a beer from another country that's similar?” he asked.

“Look, we're not denying that over consumption of alcohol is obviously bad for you but I think that it can there's a better way of doing it, maybe more subtle label would work.

“A big problem as well is the calories and other aspects - if there's a generic labels, then you know, we could put that onto our cans and other producers could put on their wine bottles, but we have to produce a different label for every single product, which makes it more difficult.”

Alcohol being consumed by someone on a plane. Image: david pearson / Alamy. 27 November 2010

These labels are more difficult for small producers, Mr O’Donoghue said.

“You would have to have [the labels] for Ireland but you could choose not to have them for export - but that's inefficient for a small company like ours,” he said.

“We print off the cans, you know, we buy 70,000 cans at a time, which would do us for six months or a year, so we're not going to do that twice for two different markets.

“The big multinational companies can afford to do that, they have different bottling lines and canning lines for different markets.

“Small companies like ourselves or any other craft brewery or producer - it's an extra cost.”

Woman buying a bottle of red wine and looking at alcoholic drinks in shop. Image: Alamy

This is the second big cost surrounding labels that has come in the last year, Mr O’Donoghue said.

“It reminds me a lot of the Deposit Return Scheme, so when that came in, that was a big cost to us,” he said.

“We had to reproduce all our cans, get them redesigned with the DRS label on it.

“Here we are again, with another cost of getting different labels for our cans.”

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Beer cans. 09/01/2012 Photograph: Sasko Lazarov/Photocall Ireland