Diageo's plans to invest £600 million in constructing the first new “super-brewery” in either Ireland or the UK have been put on hold as a consequence of the global economic turndown.

The drinks group said that it now intends instead to carry out a strategic review of its investments, which will take several months to complete.

The announcement was made against a background of declining beer sales in the licensed trade and the closure of many pubs in Ireland.

Amid much fanfare last year Diageo said that it would scale back its brewing activities at its iconic St James’s Gate plant on the banks of Dublin’s River Liffey, where Arthur Guinness began brewing stout in 1759.

The company would have retained its Guiness Hop Store at St James’s Gate, which is one of the Irish capital’s biggest tourist attractions.

But the historic link with the first brewer of the Guinness family would be burnished by the construction of a new super-brewery on a 73-acre site in Leixlip, Co Kildare, where Arthur Guinness established his first operation in 1755.

The new brewery would have been built on 50 acres of land bought from the Guinness family and the remaining acreage from Kildare County Council.

The drinks company said this week: “As a result of the current difficult global economic situation . . . Diageo has decided to conduct a re-evaluation of this brewing investment programme in order to ensure its scope remains appropriate in the changed economic environment.”

A spokeswoman said that Diageo remained committed to the Irish market. “We want to make sure the assumptions we made are still the right ones but there is no doubting our commitment to the Irish market.”

In the light of the economic downturn Diageo added that it had “paused” its application to Kildare County Council for planning permission.

The new brewery, which was to have been named after Arthur Guinness, was intended to brew five million hectolitres of beer annually for export markets.

Plans to close breweries in Dundalk and Kilkenny, with the loss of some 450 job, have also been suspended.

The collapse in the Irish property market is likely to have played a significant part in Diageo’s decision to put its plans on hold. Economists widely forecast no recovery in Ireland's jobs and property markets until 2010 at the earliest.

Diageo's investment plan, announced in May last year, was to have been in part funded by the sale of surplus land at its Dundalk, Kilkenny and St James’s Gate breweries, which was estimated then to be worth about €500 million (£460,000).

In its May 2008 announcement, Diageo said that the new super-brewery would take on production of several beer brands as well as the secret-recipe "essence" extract for Guinness that it ships to its nearly 50 stout breweries worldwide.

The St James’s Gate brewery would become responsible exclusively for brewing stout for the Irish and British markets.

The announcement took staff by surprise. Trade unions representing the 1,500 staff had been engaged in talks with Diageo for several months on severance terms and staffing issues for the new brewery.

Diageo's major brewing competitor in Ireland, Heineken NV of the Netherlands, last month announced that bit was closing a brewery that for 210 years has produced Beamish, a local competitor to Guinness, in the southwest Irish city of Cork.

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