Next time you’re in a Belfast pub, look at the taps.
If you see Guinness, Rockshore, Harp, and Smithwick’s all lined up together, you’re looking at a Diageo house. Different brands, different multinational. But the pattern is always the same. The taplist tells you who owns the debt.
This isn’t about taste or quality. It’s about money. Specifically, it’s about what happens when you need £100,000 just to get permission to pour a pint.
Northern Ireland has one of the most restrictive licensing systems in Europe. It’s been that way for over a century. And like most things that make no sense in 2026, it started with good intentions, bad timing, and a moral panic about the working class having too much fun.
The Respectable Exit
In the late 1800s, the Temperance movement wasn’t asking nicely. It was a full cultural force in Protestant Ulster. Alcohol was a social evil. The pub trade was disreputable. Association with drink could damage your family’s standing in church, in business, in society.
So respectable Protestant capital did what respectable capital does. It moved somewhere cleaner. Linen. Shipbuilding. Heavy engineering. The industries that were building industrial Belfast into an economic powerhouse.
This wasn’t a gradual shift. This was a deliberate exit from an entire sector of the economy, creating a vacuum that Catholic families filled. While Harland & Wolff and the engineering firms were shutting Catholics out of skilled industrial work, the licensed trade became one of the few sectors where they could build businesses and create wealth.
By the early 1900s, the demographic split was clear. Then 1923 locked it in place.
The Temperance Freeze
The Intoxicating Liquor Act of 1923 was classic moral legislation. Too many pubs. Too much drinking. Something must be done.
The solution was the Surrender Principle. No new licenses would be issued. If you wanted to open a new pub, you had to buy an existing license from someone else and surrender it to the court. One in, one out. The net number would stay frozen or, ideally, decrease over time.
The logic was simple. Reduce the supply of licenses, reduce the number of pubs, reduce the amount of drinking. Temperance through bureaucracy.
What nobody seems to have considered was what happens when you turn a permission slip into a finite resource. You create a market.
Unintended consequences, 1923 edition: By capping the number of licenses, the Act accidentally created a new asset class. Something scarce. Something tradeable. Something that would, over the next century, become worth than a luxury sports car, more than three times the average salary.
How Northern Ireland Diverged
The rest of the UK moved on. England reformed its licensing system in 2003. You can now apply for a new license, pay a fee based on your premises (usually a few hundred pounds), follow the rules, and you’re licensed. Straightforward. Boring. Functional.
Northern Ireland kept the 1923 system.
There are roughly 2,800 liquor licenses in Northern Ireland. That number is effectively frozen. If you want to open a pub or a taproom, you go to the secondary market and buy someone’s license. Current market rate: £100,000.
If you bought a license in the 1960s, you probably paid a few thousand pounds. By the 1980s, it might have been worth £20,000. By the 2000s, £50,000. Today, £100,000 or more. This is a spectacular return on investment for doing absolutely nothing. The asset appreciated purely because supply stayed capped while demand didn’t disappear.
The Financing Problem
Most small businesses don’t have £100,000 sitting around. Banks are nervous about lending that kind of money for what is, legally speaking, just a permission slip that could theoretically be reformed away by a future government.
So where does the money come from? The multinationals.
Here’s the model that dominates Northern Ireland’s pub trade. A global brewer offers to loan you the money to buy the license, plus help with fit-out costs and equipment. In exchange, you sign a supply agreement. A tie. You stock their products exclusively. Their beer, their spirits, often their soft drinks. For years. Sometimes decades.
The tie isn’t a gentleman’s agreement. It’s secured debt. If your business hits trouble, the brewer isn’t just a supplier. They’re a creditor with legal claim to your assets. This is why you can look at a pub’s taps and know who financed them. The taplist is the receipt.
Case Study: When The Tie Breaks
In 2013, Botanic Inns collapsed. At the time, they were Northern Ireland’s biggest pub chain, owning The Bot, The Northern Whig, The Kitchen Bar, McHughs. Landmark Belfast venues.
When they went into administration owing £14 million, the creditor list revealed the reality. Ulster Bank, obviously. But also Diageo, owed approximately £275,000 in trade debt and soft loans.
This wasn’t a scandal. This was business as usual. Botanic Inns had expanded using the standard model. Borrow from the brewer, tie the taps, grow the chain. When the cash flow dried up, Diageo was in line with the other creditors demanding repayment.
The collapse exposed what the industry already understood. The multinationals aren’t just suppliers. They’re acting as secondary banks, using debt to control who gets into the market and what those businesses can sell once they’re in.
What The Tie Means In Practice
Walk into a Diageo-tied house and you’ll see Guinness, Rockshore, Harp, Smithwick’s on the taps. That’s the portfolio. That’s what the contract says you pour. You’re not experimenting with local craft beer. You’re not stocking small Northern Irish breweries.
The system is built for people who already own licenses and multinationals who can finance new entrants in exchange for market control.
Where We Are Now
Northern Ireland is one of the hardest places in Europe to open a pub, bar, or brewery taproom. The barrier to entry is £100,000. The dominant business model is the tied house, financed by multinationals in exchange for exclusive supply contracts.
The 1923 Surrender Principle created artificial scarcity. Scarcity created asset value. Asset value created a financing problem. The financing problem gave multinationals leverage to control the market through debt.
We’re not running a free market for hospitality. We’re running a century-old licensing system designed to make people drink less by reducing the number of pubs. The law worked. It reduced the number of pubs.
It just turned a permission slip into a £100,000 asset and handed the keys to the multinationals in the process.