DUBLIN — Bars across Ireland will be thronged on Thursday with early evening drinkers. Groups of inebriated young people will be staggering around the streets, and hospital emergency rooms will be packed.

No, this is not St. Patrick’s Day. It is Arthur’s Day — an annual paean to Guinness first concocted by marketing gurus in 2009 to promote the 250th anniversary of the drink so intimately associated with Ireland.

But to a growing chorus of critics, it is becoming a national embarrassment. Eamonn McCann, a journalist and political activist, put it succinctly in his column in The Belfast Telegraph. “Has there ever been a scam like Arthur’s Day,” he wrote, “as contemptuous of the people it targets, as disrespectful of the culture and especially of the music it misuses to make its play, as depressing in the extent to which the people made fools of simper with pleasure and cry out for more?”

Diageo, the multinational drinks company that owns the Guinness brand, says the shindig brings together three celebrated strands of Irish culture: Guinness, the pub and music. Its promotional material exhorts people “to paint the town black” — the color of a Guinness stout — and calls the day “a remarkable celebration of those who make things happen.”