Boom time is back with two of the capital’s best-known hotels reporting a sharp increase in profits for last year.

Net sales of Guinness in Ireland fell by 5% in the past 12 months but, due to an overall contraction in the beer sector, the brand maintained its healthy market share.

Incoming Diageo CEO Ivan Menezes, the latest Indian-born businessman to head a global multinational, is likely to continue the strategy of his predecessor by focusing on growth in emerging markets, writes John Daly

Diageo is in talks to acquire a stake in Indian billionaire Vijay Mallya’s United Spirits Ltd, reviving an on-again, off-again courtship that would ramp up its presence in the world’s largest whiskey market.

THE THOUGHTS of a package holiday in the Canaries have always filled me with dread.

THE western end of Cork City suburb Sunday’s Well once hosted a prison, a Good Shepherd Convent Magdalen Asylum, and two pubs.

The hospitality group that last year rescued Four Star Pizza recorded profits of €3.6m in 2010, reporting an increase in profitability for last year.

The maker of Guinness, Smithwick’s, Bushmills, and Bailey’s said its annual growth in Africa is set to accelerate beyond the current 15%, helped by its zero-duty Senator keg beer in Kenya and a strong rise sales of Johnnie Walker and Smirnoff.

WEST Cork native John Harnedy, who runs Glanbia’s facility in Virginia, Co Cavan, is bringing the curtain down on 41 years of service with the company — and is retiring on the precise date he joined the organisation, on March 31.

THE continuing contraction of the pub trade sector of the Irish drinks market led to an 8% year-on-year decline in net sales — and an 8.6% volume decline — for Guinness here in the last six months of 2010.

AMERICAN consumers would like to have greater access to Irish food products, according to a new survey by Dublin-based Amárach Research.

Disappointing results and news of hefty write-downs from Bradford & Bingley sent the London market into the red today as fears grew over the banking sector.

MORE THAN 40,000 Irish cows are required to produce 50 million gallons of milk every year to produce the 2,260 glasses of Baileys that are consumed every minute of every day worldwide.

GUINNESS has blamed warm weather and fewer people going to bars for a fall-off in sales of the black stuff.

BAILEYS today launches a new look for its cream liqueur bottle more in keeping with the modern Irish image.

The bodies of schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman were set on fire in the overgrown ditch where they were dumped, the murder trial of their alleged killer heard today.

MILLIONS of euro in tax and duty are being lost to the Exchequer as shoppers head to Northern Ireland to make savings of €5 a bottle on spirits, it emerged yesterday.

Bailey's is to move some of its cream liqueur production to Germany.

UP to 200 of the 700 administrative workers employed by Diageo at their Guinness and United Distillers operations in Ireland may be made redundant in the coming days.