Gavan Reilly: What Cuba’s beer market can tell you about the next five years

A few years back - pre-kids, as you can imagine - I found myself on holiday in Cuba. It’s fabulous, by the way, and well worth a visit, for the weather, the culture, and the political nerdery. It’s also like stepping into an alternative universe, where the same level of technological prowess is hampered by a national restraint. You could get WiFi openly and easily, for example, but the cellular networks had no data capacity so you’d have to buy a voucher for WiFi services from the State-owned telecoms company. (On otherwise quiet side streets, you’d turn a corner and suddenly see a few dozen people all sitting on the pavement, their faces illuminated in soft blue. They were using those vouchers for a poorly advertised public WiFi point.)

If you’re a rum drinker, Cuba is paradise, but if you’re a beer drinker you might find the options a little underwhelming. Cuba has two currencies but one of them is used almost exclusively by tourists, meaning most foreigners will only ever drink one of two beers: Cristal, which is 4.6% proof, and Bucanero which is 5.1%. Other than the overall impact after a session, you’d barely tell the difference: the two are fairly mild-tasting, slightly watery lagers. The packaging is different but really the products are exactly the same. Which is hardly surprising, given they’re made by the same company.

In most other countries you wouldn’t get away with this kind of market dominance; people wouldn’t stand for the blandness of the market offering and someone else would have moved in to cater to the market need for variety. But in Cuba, where the market is artificially constrained by the State, the people simply get by with two options. If you don’t like this one beer, the other option is one that tastes the same.

How will people feel when they go to the polls in winter 2029, about the big two options remaining on the Irish electoral playing field? If the government coming together in the next fortnight does what it say it will do, and remain in office for five Budgets, then the decade of the 2020s will be bookended by two elections: one with the first ever (full and formal) FF-FG coalition, the other with those parties likely entwined together by a decade sharing power, such that neither can ever govern without the other.

These are the Cristal and the Bucanero of the Irish market. When there’s so many other options in an increasingly crowded market, why would people stick with the same two plain old options? Is there even space for the two of them to exist in the independent way they do today? In Italy, Peroni and Nastro Azzurro are sold as different products; in the rest of the world, there’s only one way for them to survive and that’s to become one and the same.

Ireland’s siamese twin parties will have a hell of a job trying to convince us why they shouldn’t be seen as one and the same.