It's "undeniably true" that Ireland is one of the most expensive places to buy a pint, according to consumer expert Conor Pope.
He was speaking after a new study listed Dublin as the fifth most expensive city in the world to buy a pint.
The money.co.uk study put the price of a pint in the capital at €5.53 - four times more expensive than a pint in Buenos Aires.
San Francisco was the most expensive place for a pint at €6.74, followed by Melbourne, Boston and London.
However, Conor Pope - Pricewatch Editor with The Irish Times - told The Hard Shoulder he's not entirely convinced by the list.
He said: “I’m surprised we’re the fifth most expensive, because there seems to be a lot of countries not on the list. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Finland, Iceland or Copenhagen… the price of a pint there is absolutely outrageous.
“The most expensive [place] they could find was San Francisco… they put the price at around €6.50. There’s a lot of places in the world that have prices way in excess of that.
“I was amazed they put the price of a pint [in Dublin] at around €5.50. There’s an awful lot of pints that cost an awful lot more than that in Dublin."
Conor said he believes Irish people take a “masochistic thrill” when it’s revealed the country is one of the most expensive in the world for something or other.
Nonetheless, he believes it's still “undeniably true” that Ireland - not just Dublin - is up there as one of the countries where it’s most expensive places to buy a pint.
He observed: “Ireland is not a cheap place to socialise… to go out for dinner… or to go for a pint. It’s just part of the world in which we live.
“Vintners will rightly point to the high taxes and excise duty that’s attached to alcohol. Then there are the high overhead publicans will rightly point to.
“People earn more here than they do in Portugal or Spain, and that’s obviously going to have an impact on prices.”
Conor suggested it's “irksome” to be in Dublin - right in the shadow of the Guinness factory at St James’s Gate - and be paying more for a pint than elsewhere in Europe.
He suggested: “We should at least get some kind of benefit for the alcohol and booze that’s brewed in this country.”
However, he said publicans will charge "whatever the market will bear" - and the market will bear whatever people are willing to pay.
