{"id":658228,"date":"2026-10-18T07:28:10","date_gmt":"2026-10-18T07:28:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/658228\/"},"modified":"2026-10-18T07:28:10","modified_gmt":"2026-10-18T07:28:10","slug":"mark-zuckerberg-drinks-pint-wrong-leaving-his-irish-reputation-in-tatters-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/658228\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Zuckerberg drinks pint wrong, leaving his Irish reputation in tatters \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Despite being a strong supporter of the local GAA<\/a>, Mark Zuckerberg took some damage to his position as an honorary Irishman this week after appearing to drink a pint of Guinness wrong. <\/p>\n

Joining Limerick billionaire John Collison<\/a> in a Two Johnnies-style fake pub he uses to host a tech chatshow, Zuckerberg took what might have been his first ever sips of the national beverage. As Meta\u2019s chief AI officer Alexandr Wang described asking his AI agent to source \u201cincreasingly obscure teas\u201d, a clip captured the Facebook founder reacting to the taste by making what one might describe as \u201ca face\u201d, taking several seconds to swallow. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhy did he chew it?\u201d asked one observer, while others suggested that he may accidentally have inhaled a mouthful of foam, a hazard for the inexperienced. A blow to his reputation, certainly.<\/p>\n

Cheeky Pint is back! Mark Zuckerberg @finkd<\/a> and Alexandr Wang @alexandr_wang<\/a> came to the pub to discuss their new frontier model, Muse Wonder.<\/p>\n

00:00:24 Muse\u2019s breakout use cases
00:07:28 The model is the product
00:14:35 Muse Wonder
00:24:56 How frontier models are built\u2026 pic.twitter.com\/X3lrKFIaPs<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 John Collison (@collision) October 12, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n

It\u2019s not compulsory to drink Guinness performatively any time you\u2019re in public with an Irishman, but it does seem to help. How did Zuckerberg compare with other very famous people offered the chance? <\/p>\n

He performed better than Queen Elizabeth II, who drank none, reacting to the pint presented to her at the Storehouse<\/a> in 2011 with the same passive quarter-smile she might have given to a youth choir, but fared far worse than Barack Obama, who \u201cgave it a right wallop\u201d in Moneygall the same year<\/a>, to a chorus of local-political yehows. <\/p>\n

\"ThenThen UN secretary general Ban Ki Moon enjoys a pint of Guinness at Brogan’s in Dublin. Photograph: UN Photo\/Evan Schneider <\/p>\n

Overheard\u2019s favourite effort is that of former UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon, who appeared to appreciate his Guinness at Brogan\u2019s, near the Olympia Theatre in Dublin, in 2015: a series of images capturing the pintman\u2019s progress remain on the official United Nations website<\/a>.<\/p>\n

None of these people had a house in Waterford, however, and the standards are higher for Zuckerberg in his new guise as a possible JP McManus-style bazooka of funding for local hurlers. <\/p>\n

Overheard scanned the entire two-hour video to seek more information, and neither Zuckerberg nor Wang come close to matching Collison\u2019s pace: the native son\u2019s glass is totally empty around minute 36, with the Meta execs still nursing glasses half full.<\/p>\n

The full video does show the contents of Zuckerberg\u2019s pint continuing to diminish, however, and, after being replaced with a new one, his final tally appears to be around 1.4 pints. As thirsty as a data centre, that fellah.<\/p>\n

Duty calls<\/p>\n

Zuckerberg paid \u20ac51,171,155 for Strancally Castle<\/a> in Co Waterford, a price he could afford 5,100 times over, according to the latest estimate of his net worth. But things aren\u2019t as simple for the Land Development Agency<\/a>, tasked with turning taxpayer money into taxpayer housing as efficiently as possible.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the dreaded red tape to blame, as the agency\u2019s annual report lays out. <\/p>\n

At two sites \u2013 Clonmore in Cork and Hollystown in west Dublin \u2013 sods were turned, homes built, ribbons cut and members of the public housed, all roughly according to plan.<\/p>\n

So what\u2019s the problem? <\/p>\n

Delays, cursed delays. All things being equal, the agency would have acquired the houses from builder partners and resold them in time to get the stamp duty back under a recently added legal provision to let providers of \u201caffordable dwelling purchase arrangements\u201d do their work. The cost would have been zero.<\/p>\n

But there is a time bar of a year applied to the refund, and the agency crashed into it. At Clonmore, closing the sale of the homes was delayed in 21 of 26 cases. It was left on the hook for \u20ac646,789. <\/p>\n

Worse was the situation in Hollystown, where it got landed with a \u20ac2,751,982 stamp duty bill. It was relying on reclaiming this amount to make the development profitable, but time waits for no State agency, and it wound up being booked as a \u20ac1,888,107 loss.<\/p>\n

Handily, the stamp duty is paid to the exchequer, so the taxpayer makes out okay. <\/p>\n

\"TheThe L\u00c9 James Joyce at the Bray air show in 2023. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw\/The Irish Times Ireland\u2019s blokey boats<\/p>\n

When it comes to military might, some of Ireland\u2019s neighbours wouldn\u2019t mind if the Government pumped more resources into the defence of Europe\u2019s watery Atlantic fringe. But in soft power terms, we dominate as ever. <\/p>\n

The British might have sent HMS Invincible to the Falklands, but we rule the waves with the L\u00c9 William Butler Yeats, the L\u00c9 George Bernard Shaw, the L\u00c9 Samuel Beckett and the L\u00c9 James Joyce. Who needs dazzle camouflage when you have literary modernism?<\/p>\n

Whose idea was all this? That of Vice Admiral Mark Mellett, former chief of staff of the Defence Forces and head of the Naval Service<\/a>, whose forthcoming book Blue Heart recounts bringing the proposal to then minister for defence Alan Shatter in 2012. <\/p>\n

\u201cMy reasoning was simple,\u201d he said. \u201cWherever these ships operated, and whenever their names were broadcast over maritime channels, their Irish identity would be unmistakable. The names themselves became a force multiplier for Irish sovereignty, echoing hundreds of nautical miles wherever they were called.\u201d <\/p>\n

The eagle-eyed will note that all four vessels named before the policy was reversed were dedicated to blokes, a strategic weakness that might be picked up on by feminist critics patrolling the Rockall Bank area. Not the fault of Mellett. <\/p>\n

\u201cHad I my way,\u201d he notes, \u201cnames like … Maeve Binchy would have been fitting.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"DanielDaniel Day-Lewis in Phantom Thread Losing the thread<\/p>\n

Back on dry land, author Colm T\u00f3ib\u00edn<\/a> has been having a good time of it lately. Not long after the launch of an An Post stamp<\/a> commemorating his novel Brooklyn, he was receiving an honorary degree from the 736-year-old University of Macerata in Italy this week, an event that featured someone delivering something called a \u201claudatio\u201d.<\/p>\n

In the midst of all the institutional acclaim, however, he made a misstep. Writer Doireann N\u00ed Ghr\u00edofa recounted on her Instagram account<\/a> an incident that took place as she prepared for an appearance on The Comfort Zone, a culture discussion programme cohosted by T\u00f3ib\u00edn with presenter Luke Clancy on Lyric FM.<\/p>\n

N\u00ed Ghr\u00edofa, author of the award-winning Ghost in the Throat and this year\u2019s Said the Dead, suggested \u201cone of my favourite films\u201d to chew over: Phantom Thread, a 2017 film starring Daniel Day-Lewis as a couture tailor whose intense relationship with his muse, Vicky Krieps, gets him into trouble. Acclaimed as one of the best films of the 21st century so far, critics tend to reach for words such as \u201cpoignant\u201d and \u201cdeft\u201d to describe it.<\/p>\n

What did T\u00f3ib\u00edn think? Hard to know: he accidentally watched The Phantom Menace, the divisive 1999 reboot of the Star Wars franchise featuring double-lightsabered antagonist Darth Maul and Jamaican-coded reptile Jar Jar Binks. <\/p>\n