Author: dublinbypub

Slattery’s: Capel Street

Alike all the great cities in the world, dear Dublin of ours is one that is often defined by its most famed thoroughfares. We may not have avenues that garner attention on par with that afforded to the Champs-Élysées or Broadway, but there can be little doubt that our little metropolis is oft-characterised by the expanse of O’Connell Street darkened in the rebellious shade of the GPO’s grandeur, or by the hustle and bustle of the Grafton streetscape vignetted in sound by the various buskers of the given day.

Of course, there is little wrong with these scenes; they are what they are by no accident, but, as all keen and unkeen travellers alike will tell you, the real heart of any city is, more times than not, found off the beaten path. Hidden off in small side streets, where industry and old habits clamour against nightlife and gentrification, is the concentrated distillate of a city’s very essence.

Harbouring about as great a variance of energy as the underground pipes knocking about over on the continent around CERN, Capel Street is one of Dublin’s better examples of the streets described above. Serving as a main, yet narrow artery from Dorset Street as far as Grattan Bridge, it’s a street that pulls far more traffic than was ever intended. Acting as something of a demarcation between the end of the Henry Street shopping district and the beginning of the more residential setting that lies close to The Four Courts, it is a street that we would wager gets its unique energy from the variety of businesses that are to be found along its length. These contain, though are not limited to:

• Pubs
• Restaurants – both Dine-In and Take Away
• Charity Shops
• Barbers
• Sex Shops
• Antique Shops
• Electronic Repair Shops
• Music Shops
• A Hardware
• A Tool Shop
• Bookmakers
• A Pet Shop
• A Tattoo Parlour
• A Jewellers
• A Comic Book Store
• A Tailor
• A Workwear Shop
• A Model Shop
• A Hemp Shop

Sitting somewhere roughly around the middle of all of this is Slattery’s. Along the corner that facilitates the meeting of Mary Street, Little and Capel Street, it strikes a more curved appearance than any other on the street. Complete with its Romanesque windows and striking façade, you could argue it to be the most unique-looking on the street.

Operating as a licensed premises since the 1800s, the pub boasts having obtained the authority to operate as an early house in 1892 in order to cater to the once-bustling nearby market trade. Though trading through the Rising, the War of Independence and the Emergency, we would argue that the pub’s most notable contribution to Dublin and Irish history is its use as a music venue in the latter half of the 20th Century.

One doesn’t have to exhaust too much clicking power in their research of this pub to find that it happened to become a bit of a muso’s paradise from the 1960s onward. Catering for genres aplenty, it was the go-to venue for rockers, bluesmen, pipers, singers, and listeners galore. There are accounts of all sorts of different musical nights on the various floors of the pub: an acoustic night, a blues night and a number of different trad nights – a long-running one called The Tradition Club and another, The Mug’s Gig, organised by Donal Lunny and Andy Irvine – so-called as it took place on a Monday night.

The trad nights in the pub, by all accounts, were legendary; a recording of a night at The Tradition Club survives and is available here. Cream of the crop participation wasn’t unusual with some of the evenings pulling in anyone from Seamus Ennis to Ronnie Drew up to Andy and Donal, and their pal, Christy Moore. Christy even namechecked the publican, Paddy Slattery, in his song “Me And The Rose”.

Phil Lynott is also said to have frequented the pub too, an account of him reciting some of his spoken word poetry at an acoustic night is given by a pal of his, Ivan Pawle, in Graeme Thomson’s biography of Phillip. It would even seem that the pub’s ability to pull in the stars of stage and screen hasn’t waned too much, given that it was the venue of choice for Anthony Bourdain when he wanted to make use of the early license for the cure and a fry in the Dublin edition of his TV show, The Layover.

Slattery’s is a good-looking pub, there’s little denying that. With its rectangular bar sat in the middle of the pub, it offers up plenty of choice in the ‘ol nook and cranny department. The matte-tiled floor, colourful in comparison to the rest of the pub’s dark wooden interior, contrasts well. And there’s a sort of museum redbrick wall adorned with ephemera relating to the 1916 Rising, which flanks the stairs down to the toilet.

Whether as a result of the Bourdain visit or not, the pub would seem to be geared more toward a tourist market these days. We found this to be evidenced, firstly, by a substantial collection of literature and leaflets about day trips and visitor experiences beside the entrance, and secondly, by the over-enthusiastic floor staff who tended to pester us with food menus and premature glass collection while we were there last.

A Membership Card for The Listener’s Club in Slattery’s.

Thirdly, and perhaps most conclusively, was our winding up on a crawl with a few Norwegians during this visit. Through a mouthful of snus, one of these lads told us that they arrange a trip to Dublin every few years to satisfy their relish toward decent Guinness: fair play to them. Speaking of Guinness, Slatterys pours a decent one, which warrants no negative commentary regarding taste. Financially, though, we found it less agreeable, it being relatively high to some of the neighbours (€5.60, as of May 2019). Though when our pals from Norway told us about the fifteen quid price tag, apiece, on their pints back home, admittedly, it didn’t feel so bad.

So be ye celebrity chef, ballad singer extraordinaire or stout-thirsty Scandinavian, we can only offer you the same advice we’ve been doling out to one and all for many’s the year. Namely, that Capel Street is one of Dublin’s greater drinking streets, due in no small part to the fact that it has no bad pubs, and Slattery’s is most certainly no exception to that.

July 22, 2020
JACK CHARLTON, DEPECHE MODE & HILL 16

This is a bit of an abstract post, relative to our usual content – but I thought it worth writing.

It started innocently enough in the depths of COVID lockdown. Pintman №2 gets a text in one of his WhatsApp groups – a screenshot of a picture that pops up now and again of Andy Fletcher from Depeche Mode, supposedly sitting in a Dublin Pub beside a little old dear in 1983. It’s a fantastic snap! Two completely different worlds collided in silent wonder. But the picture, of course, begs the question – any idea what pub? And this is where the obsession begins.

The image in question.

None of us have a clue at the outset. Most of us weren’t alive when it was taken. The first port of call is to the original post – it had been uploaded by RareIrishStuff, an antiques dealer, on Instagram. A resounding agreement in the comments from people of the era will suffice as evidence for us – but it’s not to be seen here. The bulk of the comments are people tagging their mates.

So, I resort to Facebook. I’ve seen the image there in the past. I find it on in one of these Dublin Nostalgia groups I’m in and scour the comments to find a few lone suggestions, none of which, alone, will satisfy our curiosity but might lead us in the right direction.

“Could be Lowe’s”, says someone. We check. Lowes has moved location since 1983, it having previously been located on one of The Four Corners of Hell. We find photos of it back then and check it on Google Maps in its current location. No Joy.

Lowes, then and now.

The Stag’s Head

We start to forensically examine the picture. The beermats are certainly a clue – they clearly state: “Stag For Enjoyment”. Stag’s head, we dare to hope for a minute before agreeing that these probably refer to Stag Lager (correction: Stag was a cider, not a lager. Thanks to Jack Gleeson on Twitter for the heads up) and that this is not the Stag’s Head. We check Dame Lane on Google Maps, anyway and find that the ironwork outside the pub has an insignia similar in style to that of the one on the window in the picture. But the windows in the Stag’s Head don’t correspond.

The Window

This segues us nicely into the window, the most unique feature of the image. The insignia set into the centre of it is the logical first section to examine. We decide that it’s most likely to be intended to be street-facing, meaning that it’s back-to-front in the image. So we flip it to have a look at what it’s supposed to look like from the front. It seems to contain some sort of combination of letters: J and a C, for certain. Maybe a T too. The James Connolly? The Julius Caesar? The Jesus Christ?

J O Connell in Portobello, I wonder, half knowing that it couldn’t be. We check and find that the building doesn’t conform to the window shape. We then set about looking for old Dublin pub and publican names conforming to some assortment of the initials but tire of this easily enough. We park that and move on.

The Gig, The Venue & The Magazine

We know that the image coincides with a gig that Depeche Mode were playing so the location of the gig seems the next logical thing to look at. There are a few different suggestions as to where that was in the various comment sections of the various instances of the photo on social media – the most common of which are that is was in The SFX – the St. Francis Xavier hall on Dorset St. We set about confirming that and in doing so, find a scan of the original article that featured the picture in NME Magazine.

The magazine article, which is uploaded to a fantastic website called BrandNewRetro, makes no mention of name of the pub – nor the website post it is attached to. The post even asks readers if they recognise the pub. There’s a comment section where one of the commenters offers The Welcome Inn, on Parnell Street, as a possible solution. Its proximity to the venue makes it worthy of checking out.

The Photographer

Photography: Adrian Boot, the article reads, in capital font – we type it into Google and find a link to his Facebook page – not a business page. His personal profile. I hover over the Add Friend button for a moment. Fuck it, I think. I’ve come this far. To my surprise, the man who stood in this very pub and snapped this very picture adds me back almost immediately.

Instantly, I set about posting to his profile. I craft a graceful and complimentary paragraph to accompany the photo and ultimately ask him if he remembers the location. Moments that feel like eternities pass and a notification pops up. He has replied. I wait for it to load.

“haven’t got a clue”

Fuck ye in anyways, Adrian!

By now we’re weary. We decide we’ve probably exhausted every avenue and nearly agree that we’ll have to put the matter to bed. But not before one last check on the Instagram post to see if there are any more suggestions. And there we lay our eyes on a post that says:

“Hill16. The glass pane is now behind the bar in Brannigans Cathedral St. It was brought there by the previous owner from the hill.”

Brannigan’s

We’ve been in Brannigan’s a good few times but it doesn’t ring a bell. Google Images to the rescue. Lo and Behold, there it is in all its glory, the very same insignia in the middle.

The bar in Brannigan’s

We pull up a few historical pictures of the Hill 16. They are not close up enough that any details in the windows can be made out. But we count the panels in the windows facing onto the street and they seem to check out.

2 Old Photos of The Hill 16 Bar from The Dublin Library Collection

Comparing the panels in the two windows

But then we notice that there’s a difference in the two. In the Brannigan’s one, the sections with the cross (the +) are on the outside. But they’re not so in the image of Andy.

It’s late. And we’ve been at this a while. Begrudgingly, we have no option but to accept that this is just a different window in the pub. We actually have exhausted every avenue now. We’re about 65% sure it’s the Hill 16. That will do. We need to sleep.

Big Jack Enters

Fast forward another two or three months and Ireland is set into grief and mourning upon the announcement of the death of Jack Charlton. I’m watching the news that night and in the middle of one of the many reports on Jack, they roll a clip of him holding a trophy on front of a pane of very familiar-looking stained glass.

I pull the image down from the RTE Player to compare it to that from 1983 and find that Jack’s one unarguably has only the 2 initials – J and C. No sign of a T to be seen. And it appears to be in a house, as opposed to a pub. So, I google Jack Charlton Stained Glass and the glorious floodgates open.

One of the articles about Jack Charlton’s home

As per an Irish Independent article, wasn’t the stained glass window only presented to Jack by the people who ran a pub, you’ll never guess which one! Wasn’t it only The Hill 16! The boozer happens to be the first and the last pub that Jack drank in at the start of and the end of his tenure as the manager of the Republic of Ireland football team. And as such, is mentioned along with a humorous anecdote from the pub in an RTE news report on Jack’s sacking. (Link Below)

RTE Archive: Jack Charlton Resigns

And so there it was. Proven, as far as we were concerned, beyond a reasonable doubt. And Big Jackie Charlton, the man that launched a million sessions – his parting gift to us, as if he ever needed give us another. May he rest in peace.

Update:

We were overwhelmed by the response to this article after we published it. People really just can’t get enough (sorry). Anyhow, the internet really is a fantastic thing when you think about it, we had a reply to the tweet with the article from one Geoff Boyle. Geoff mentioned that The Hill 16 happened to be one that his father and his uncle “supported” back when he was growing up and asked if we’d like him to have a go at establishing the identity of the woman in the photo. We took him up on the offer, of course.

Geoff replied to us last night and told us that the woman was Lizzie Ryan. Lizzie was a street trader up on Parnell Street and she would pop in for a sup on her way home to Mountjoy Square after a day out hawking her wares.

So when you next get out to the pub and have a fresh pint on front of you, stick a bit of Depeche Mode on the Jukebox and raise your glass for Lizzie and for Big Jack.

July 17, 2020
The Bankers: Dame Lane

We used to live like lords. We’d roam freely from bar to bar, marching to the beat of the filthy change that jingled about in our arse pockets. We’d wade through packed pub gangways searching for seats that weren’t available. We’d cling to the bar and press the flesh with any hand, outstretched in our general direction. Sweaty in summer and sniffly in winter, we’d embrace friends and strangers with equal disregard for personal space. We’d breathe each other’s air, taste each other’s drinks and smoke each other’s smokes. We never booked ahead, and we’d eat only when we’d had our fill. Sometimes we wouldn’t eat at all.

We used to live like lords.

If you could possibly indulge me, I’d like to continue with a cliché. And this one has been uttered aplenty in various forms of expression, both artistic and not: But! You really just don’t know what you’ve got until you lose it. And us: we lost it all. I’m sat here a mere couple of days before some of our city’s pubs will reopen their doors and allow customers upon their premises for the first time in over three months. But now all is changed, changed utterly. Not only is a terrible beauty born, it’s also walking, talking and getting ready to go to pre-school.

We’re told that there’ll be plexiglass – walls of the stuff. There’ll also be time limits, mandatory food orders, table service, queues and all sorts of other measures, the sum of which is required in order to allow pubs open once again. It seems that spontaneity, the very essence of the magic that is the Dublin pub experience, is the one which is the most helpful to the spread of COVID-19.

We’ve chosen to use our piece on The Bankers as that which will include a bit of a COVID-19 spiel for a few reasons. Mainly because the pub has been in the media over the last few weeks, showing off the modifications, newly installed within, to deal with a socially distant customer base. It’s also the second-to-last pub that I happened to imbibe in before the great shutdown in March. And with all that’s gone on, I have to admit that I’m left with something of a newfound fondness and gratefulness for the place.

I think it’s a fair thing to say that one can have little doubt in their mind when they state that, at some point in history, a banker was a person whom one could aspire to – a pillar of the community, even. But another thing that requires little doubt is the fact that whichever particular moment in time that this was, it is certainly now dead and gone. Ask anyone of my ilk, who had the delight of trying to begin their professional life back when Brian Lenihan was popping cloves of garlic like panadol in celebrity economists’ kitchens, what their estimation of Bankers is, and I could almost promise you a response that will be as critical as it will be laden with profanity. So you might say, the name above the door of this particular pub isn’t one that has really ever had much appeal to my generation and me.

But what’s in a name? I hear you and Juliet ask. If a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, well then, a pub by any other name must surely be just as much craic. And yourself and Juliet would be correct, this pub’s name is inconsequential to its actual appeal. Once you’ve stepped inside the cosy confines of The Bankers, you’ll find that any thoughts you previously held of bludgeoning bondholders will find themselves calmly assuaged by the charm of this pokey little boozer.

Jutting, angularly, out onto Trinity Street to give way to Dame Lane, The Bankers is a pub that has no shortage of footfall outside – an attribute which affords the pub one of its finest features – its people-watching real estate. Dublin has several excellent pint-proximate people-watching spots, and the front of The Bankers is undoubtedly on par with the likes of the front window in The Long Hall.

The Bankers would easily be categorised as a small pub, relative to those about town. It’s comprised of two main sections – a low seating area toward the back and a high seating area at the front, this being the one that houses the bar. The bar, though compact, seemed to offer a good degree of choice the last time we were in. Covered in all sorts of denominations of foreign bills, a craft-thirsty Pintman №7 was happy to retrieve a pint of Wicklow Wolf from it.

Pintman №2 and I stuck to the usual pint of plain on that occasion back in March, which rang in at a price of €5.50. And a grand pour it was too.

The streetlamp style signs we like, as seen in Fallon’s

The pub itself is a dark enough space, mainly down to the stone tiled floor and the dark wood throughout. Thankfully, though, the artificial lighting used to counteract such darkness tends to be at a good level. The interior is decorated with the usual trinkets and ephemera you’d see around the pubs in town ,and was noted to be the better of the few cabinets around the place, all of which were full with illuminated whiskey bottles. We also noted that they have those streetlamp style signs that advertise both Guinness and Smithwicks, the same as can be seen in Fallon’s; we like them. The back section of the bar struck a bit of a different look, it being adorned with a large-scale mural featuring a myriad of famous Irish faces and quotes inscribed alongside.

The pub offers a full food menu, too, and with being so central, it certainly has an eye on the tourist trade. Alike others that do, we noted that the lounge staff could tend to be a bit over-exuberant when it came to glass collection and their insistence on us making use of table service, though this will probably stand to them now.

While The Bankers is a fine little pub, I’m not going to pretend that it was always one that I held any sort of a grá for. But we live in strange times. I was talking to a few friends a while back about what the last pubs we visited before lockdown were and how, through one terrible way or another, they could be the last that we would ever visit. And when I listed and thought of the last three I visited on the final day, I was on the pints, pre-lockdown – The Palace, The Bankers and Lannigan’s – I thought to myself, in a sort of pub life flashing before your eyes sort of way, that I’ve no regrets here. I didn’t waste my last ones. Time well spent.

Anyhow, we’re definitely prone to a bit of hyperbole here, so you might forgive our sorrowful tone about the new normal at the start of this piece. The video of The Bankers’ new setup looks grand. Look them up and check it out. We’re definitely gonna book a table.

July 2, 2020
Creatives Against COVID-19
In the midst of our new normal lockdown status, we stumbled upon an Instagram page called Creatives Against COVID-19. Their premise was fairly straightforward:
- Have people send in images, illustrations, photos, sketches, whatever you’re having yourself, under the one brief: ‘Soon’.
- Create and sell prints of the submitted artwork
- Donate the money to Women’s Aid & the ISPCC
Looking at the images trickling in on their feed, we were kicking a few ideas around of what we could submit and eventually put something togethe,r only to realise that we’d missed the submission deadline.

Thankfully, though, after posting the image on Instagram, the folks behind the initiative got onto us and allowed us to make a late submission. So we did. Here it is below.

It’s available for sale over on the link listed below. So if you like the look of it, please consider purchasing it as the funds will go to two very worthy causes.

https://www.creativesagainstcovid19.com/collections/photography/products/1154_dublin-by-pub

And if you’re not into it, there are hundreds more prints on the Creatives Against COVID-19 website, many of them – far superior to out efforts.

https://www.creativesagainstcovid19.com/

Update: The project did wind up in Summer 2020 and culminated in an exhibition in The Guinness Storehouse. We were delighted to see our print on display amidst all the other great entries.
May 3, 2020
The James Joyce Pub Crawl

A great number of writers are synonymous with a great number of things for different reasons. And a great number of writers are synonymous with the city of Dublin. But when it comes to levels of synonymy with this city of ours, there’s little arguing that Joyce is its foremost considered literary son.

Joyce knew Dublin – in fact, Joyce knew Dublin so well that he was able to write Ulysses in exile from the city. And to know Dublin is to know its pubs, and unsurprisingly enough, Joyce knew all about them too.

Most will have heard Joyce’s most famous quote about pubs – it being the moment that Leopold Bloom envisages a puzzle whereby one would try to cross Dublin without passing a pub, but his involvement with pubs doesn’t stop there. Joyce was said to have had argued with publishers over the inclusion of pubs in ‘Dubliners’, even at one point offering to get the go-ahead from the publicans themselves, adding that they would be ‘glad of the advertisement’.

So without further ado, let’s get down to the pubs. We originally compiled this crawl in conjunction with fundraising efforts that were being undertaken by Sweny’s Pharmacy – a 172-year-old premises which features in Ulysses – to this day it remains mostly unchanged from the days when Joyce would have visited and conjured up the initial image of Leopold Bloom stopping in for his wife’s face lotion and his lemon soap.

With this crawl, we had two main criteria in mind. Firstly and compulsory is that the pubs on the crawl are mentioned in the writings of James Joyce. Secondly is the idea that these pubs retain some of the character that they once had in the early 1900s – this is more so a desirable quality rather than a necessary one.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1wEeyGqC8KBiZ4aoKleUYQ4KVEJI1XeNE&usp=sharing

1. Davy Byrne’s

This pub is probably regarded as the ultimate Joycean watering hole in Dublin, and no James Joyce pub would be complete without it. Featured in Ulysses, Leopold Bloom stops in and orders a glass of burgundy and a Gorgonzola sandwich.

“He entered Davy Byrne’s. Moral pub. He doesn’t chat. Stands a drink now and then. But in leap year once in four. Cashed a cheque for me once.”

Truth being told, we put this one first to get it out of the way. It’s not one of our favourite boozers, it’s pricy and a bit too plush for any proper comfort. It contains little or none of the visual characteristics it would have had in 1904.

But it’s carved out its niche as a cornerstone of Joycean Dublin by retaining the original name and purveying cheese sambos and glasses of burgundy to Bloom wannabes all year round.

2. The International

Known as Ruggy O’Donohoe’s at the time of Ulysses, we’ve chosen to include The International as it’s one of Dublin’s original Victorian pubs and retains a similar aesthetic. The pub is mentioned in Episode 10, Wandering Rocks, as below:

“Opposite Ruggy O’Donohoe’s Master Patrick Aloysius Dignam, pawing the pound and a half of Mangan’s, late Fehrenbach’s, porksteaks he had been sent for, went along warm Wicklow street dawdling. It was too blooming dull sitting in the parlour with Mrs Stoer and Mrs Quigley and Mrs MacDowell and the blind down and they all at their sniffles and sipping sups of the superior tawny sherry uncle Barney brought from Tunney’s. And they eating crumbs of the cottage fruitcake, jawing the whole blooming time and sighing”

3. The Oval

The Oval is another pub which retains the same name since its mention in Ulysses. It crops up in Episode 7:

“–What’s that? Myles Crawford said with a start. Where are the other two gone?
–Who? the professor said, turning. They’re gone round to the Oval for a drink. Paddy Hooper is there with Jack Hall. Came over last night.
–Come on then, Myles Crawford said. Where’s my hat?”

While the fittings and furnishings in The Oval may not be the same as they were in the early 1900s, given that the pub was destroyed during the 1916 Rising, the pub does still have an old-time charm which should satisfy most trying to conjure up Joyce’s Dublin.

4. J. & M. Cleary

More known for its ties to Michael Collins than Ulysses, it’s mentioned in Episode 16 of the book. Back then, it traded as The Signal House.

“So, bevelling around by Mullet’s and the Signal House which they shortly reached, they proceeded perforce in the direction of Amiens street railway terminus”

J. M. Cleary’s two nearest neighbouring pubs were both mentioned in Ulysses, too. Mullets still trades under its 1906 name, and Llyod’s was known as Dan Bergin’s when it was mentioned in Ulysses. You can add these two pubs to the crawl here if you wish.

5. Mulligan’s

“When the Scotch House closed they went round to Mulligan’s. They went into the parlour at the back and O’Halloran ordered small hot specials all round. They were all beginning to feel mellow. Farrington was just standing another round when Weathers came back. Much to Farrington’s relief he drank a glass of bitter this time. Funds were getting low but they had enough to keep them going.”

I always wonder why Davy Byrne’s is perceived to be more associated with Joyce rather than Mulligan’s. Mulligan’s features in ‘Counterparts’, one of the stories in ‘Dubliners’, as prominently as Davy’s does in Ulysses, and as well as this, the pub’s appearance is far closer to that which Joyce would have seen when he was writing Dubliners.

Be sure to go into the bar on the left side of the building (pictured) and try to get a seat in the parlour down the back, where Counterparts is set, it’s just beyond the Grandfather Clock.

6. Kennedy’s

Formerly known as Conway’s, this pub is mentioned in Episode 5 in Ulysses when Bloom meets M’Coy:

I was with Bob Doran, he’s on one of his periodical bends, and what do you call him Bantam Lyons. Just down there in Conway’s we were.

So brings a conclusion to our James Joyce Pub Crawl. We finished at Kennedy’s intentionally due to its proximity to Sweny’s – so when you’ve finally reached the final boozer, do nip across to see Dublin’s greatest living Joycean relic, and grab a bar of lemon soap yourself too, you might need it after all that walking.

Notes:

Obviously, for convenience’s sake, we kept this crawl within the city centre. But if you wanted to elongate it a bit, we’d recommend you start in The Gravedigger’s, which sits beside Glasnevin Cemetery – the graveyard where Paddy Dignam is buried in Ulysses. From there, you could continue to The Brian Boru (Hedigan’s), which is also noted by the men in the car on the way out to the funeral. This will bring you onto the Cana, which you could follow all the way to The North Strand and within the vicinity of Llyods, Mullet’s and J.M Cleary’s.

April 4, 2020
Covid 19, The Pub-pocalypse and Dublin By Pub in The New York Times

So, since we last posted, the entire world has changed. I don’t need to tell you about the coronavirus; you’re likely to be getting that from all angles. But for those of you who have been living under a rock, all pubs in Dublin and Ireland have closed in a bid to stop the spread of Covid-19.

It was last Thursday, the 12th of March, that the Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, announced the closure of schools, universities and other such public spaces and advised that we all needed to start engaging in social distancing. Queue panic buying and a large move to remote working for those who can.

In the following weekend, it became quite apparent that pub-goers weren’t the best at the whole social distancing thing. And on the Saturday following the Taoiseach’s statement, and following a slew of videos from packed pubs that day and the night before, a movement aiming to dissuade pub-goers and would-be pub-goers from going to the pub began online under the hashtag #closethepubs. This was amplified when the Chief Medical Officer made mention of the issue in a press conference.

Pubs slowly began to close. The first we noticed was Peadar Browns, who announced on the Saturday morning that they felt it was in the best interest to shut up shop. Then came Grogan’s, and Grogan’s, being a pub that’s a little more known than Peadars, it cast a few fairly big ripples into the whole metaphorical pub closure ocean.

Realising that our social media reach to the pub-going public was more considerable than most, we thought it best to put something out through our active channels to push the message out further. So the graphic (pictured) was hastily put together, the ‘leave the pub now to get back to it quicker’ sentiment of it having come from Historian, podcaster and Grogan’s diehard, Donal Fallon, in a conversation we had over DM on Instagram.

Shortly thereafter, we decided to start compiling a list of pubs that had made the difficult and responsible decision to close on a Twitter thread and then things sort of took off. More and more pubs began to announce closures, and the tweet started to amass a decent amount of traction.

A thread of Dublin pubs which are known to have closed due to #COVID19 / A list of pubs to go on the lash in when this is all over.

Peadar Browne’s
Grogans
Whelan’s
Anseo
Bonobo
The Big Romance
The King’s Inn
L Mulligan Grocer’s

— Dublin By Pub (@dublinbypub) March 14, 2020

By Sunday morning, the government were in the media stating that they would legislatively shut pubs if needs be, and public pressure had shut the majority of pubs. A meeting was convened between the government and the LVA and the VFI, the latter two being the main publican lobby groups in the country. Following this meeting, it was agreed that pubs would close to facilitate the tackling of the spread of COVID-19.

So no pubs on Paddy’s Day. A grim first, especially when considering the fact that the LVA spokesperson stated that some pubs may never reopen due to the financial upheaval caused by the closures. Devastating.

So that was that. All pubs closed. Then, come Monday, I happened upon a New York Times article:

https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020/03/15/world/europe/15reuters-health-coronavirus-ireland-pubs.html

The article, which is taken from Reuters and is duplicated on a number of other major publications, including the Huffington Post and others across the world. The article, which reports on the pub closures, ends with the paragraph:

Twitter users praised the pubs that had closed voluntarily, with the DublinByPub.ie bar guide offering a list of responsible pubs “to go on the lash in when this is all over.”

So there you have it, I’ve officially added “got the phrase ‘go on the lash’ published in three major global publications” to my CV.

March 18, 2020
Frank Ryan’s: Queen St.

I want to start this post like I’ve started no other. And that is with a Leonard Cohen Lyric.

“There is a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in”

Presumably named after the republican veteran of Irish and Spanish conflicts (Update: it’s actually not) – we’d be comfortable enough in labelling Frank Ryan’s as the darkest pub in the city of Dublin, perhaps even the entire country. And as you find yourself rubbing ointment into your bloodied shins of a morning after being there, you will surely agree that there’s neither crack nor light to be found in this Smithfield bar. Sorry, Len!

A seemingly traditional pub beneath all the darkness, it makes use of wood as its primary material and is relatively narrow upon entrance. Becoming partially divided twice along its length, it eventually steps down a foot or two at the back opening, somewhat to reveal a pool table. Feeble light that is afforded to patrons of the pub tends to be by means of tea and fairy light, mostly hued in shades of red. Along the walls and hung from the ceiling, should you manage to catch a glimpse, you’ll find any amount of paraphernalia scattered around – the overarching theme of which seems to lean mostly toward music. But, that said, there’s plenty of drink-themed bric-a-brac and license plates filling in the gaps between.

I suppose you might call Frank Ryan’s the original hipster pub – it espouses all the principles the newer incarnations are at pains to remind us about. It has the craft beer, it’ll let you bring the madra in, I think it does pizza somewhere out the back too. But because it doesn’t roar this from the rooftop, and probably because the Guinness is pretty decent too, it manages to retain the charm of a proper Dublin boozer.

Whatever about cracks, there are thankfully no shortcomings in the craic here. Generally, the place keeps a nice, relaxed vibe and is the perfect venue for a night of pints and chats. Though be warned: you’ll want to try somewhere else if you find yourself oscillating at a higher frequency. We decamped into the pub last year, hyper and half-drunk, only to find ourselves subject to the sort of thing that Frank himself sailed to Spain to fight against. Well, not really – but, after having a few jars there, they decided we’d had enough and decided to refuse us further service!

The morning, nay, the afternoon that followed this sorry incident was, as you might imagine, a rough one. Waking to several texts countenancing my proposed cancellation of Frank Ryan’s, the fear set in like a sledgehammer of doom. Such was and is the abiding memory of this anxiety that I’ve yet to, ahem, darken the door of the pub since.

And to this day, the fear that I might have been barred persists. So with that in mind, allow me to finish just as I started, with the wise words of Leonard Cohen. And please, let me directly aim them toward the gatekeepers of the pub which bears the name Frank Ryan’s:

” If I have been unkind

I hope that you can just let it go by

If I, if I have been untrue

I hope you know it was never to you ”

(Update: I was back in and I was grand, maybe they didn’t see me.)

January 30, 2020
Ha’Penny Bridge Inn: Wellington Quay

Though there’s no smoky haze or abundance of black faces, and still without the bourbon stink or distant cricket hiss, you can still close your eyes and immerse into the hollering and the bawling of man and instrument. And in the rhythm of that juke joint rattl,e you can cast the Liffey as your Mississippi, and Martin Dunleavy as Blind Willie McTell and just, nearly, almost reach a state of transcendence.

But then it all shatters with a sharp tug on your coat sleeve and the piercing screech from the reddened face barking violently and abrupt toward you… ‘DRINK! DRINK!’ he screams it into my baffled face as I struggle to muster a response. “DRINK!” he screams louder again. And just as I begin to utter a response, he clarifies the matter – ‘Buy a drink! This music isn’t free”. He’s a manager… or the owner. I’ve been in the pub for no more than 40 seconds.

You could say that my first adult experience of the Ha’Penny Bridge Inn was a bit unusual, well, that was what I had assumed until I’d come to realise that finding yourself at the receiving end of the ire of this particular barman was not an unusual occurrence. Dozens of people have too relayed to me their stories of being howled at in this particular pub. I even seem to remember hearing Lankum recounting a similar tale onstage to a sell-out audience in Vicar St. one night, and again in an interview.

I’m not for one moment going to suggest that it’s okay for a grown man to shout at people like this, but you might forgive me on this occasion for endorsing this man’s penchant toward tirade. Allow me to frame it in terms of Bang-Bang. Bang-Bang, Thomas Dudley to his mother, was a Dublin character of old and is rightly revered for the break from mundanity he provided to ordinary Dubliners of his era. But, an inescapable fact of the matter is that there were almost certainly persons who departed from an encounter with him in a less-than-positive mood solely for the reason that he didn’t conform to the status quo. For better or for worse, this shouty barman is a character, and you’ll certainly leave the pub with a good story if you happen to trigger his vocal cords, which is eternally better than leaving with no story at all.

So, a month or two back, Pintman №3 and I, in the absence of any nearby uncharted pubs, decided to seek out this pugnacious publican and get to grips with a pub we haven’t paid much prior service to in the past.

Arriving in of a weekend evening, we found the place as busy as expected – I set about grabbing the last remaining seat while Pintman №3 headed to the bar. Returning pintless shortly thereafter, Pintman №3 tossed a wrapped knife and fork onto the table, leaving me to wonder aloud as to whether he’d ordered food. No, no, he responded, throw them into my bag, there will ye? Obliging him, I held off on a follow-up question when he immediately explained his rationale around the act – it’s €5.90 a pint, have to make that up somehow.

One of the more authentically traditional boozers of the Temple Bar district, the Ha’penny Bridge Inn is standard enough in its appearance, an L-shaped sort of room with the bar on the larger side of the L. We’d categorise it as a small to medium pub. There’s no messing about with seating, which is upholstered in a red pattern and comes just as good and cosy as it would in any standard suburban local. A mesh of tile and wood makes up the flooring, and the most notable feature of the pub is probably the collection of fabric badges and crests, which are affixed to the ceiling above the bar. We agreed that it had the makings of a good cosy shop, but lost out on being classified as such due to the front doors to the street being permanently open. Oh, and that €5.90 pint was far more acceptable to all relevant sensory considerations than it was to those of a budgetary nature.

In the end, having discovered that our cacophonous friend wasn’t about, we headed on for somewhere a bit more familiar on this night. I hope he’s still putting in the odd shift now and again. The Ha’penny is certainly by no means a bad pub and is most definitely the pick of the bunch when you lump in its nearest neighbours. So, if you think €5.90, or 1,180 ha’pennies, is a fair price for a pint, by all means – have at it. Just leave the cutlery alone!

January 23, 2020
The Patriot’s Inn: Kilmainham

“This old pub standeth on sacred ground, surrounded by the high walls of the Royal Kilmainham Hospital, by the ancient cemetary of Bully’s Acre and the dungeons of Kilmainham Jail. The Patriot’s Inn has been closer to the pulse of Irish history than any other contemporary pub.”

So says the signage sitting at the entrance to the Patriots Inn pub in Kilmainham. Now far be it from us to stand here today and call this pub’s historical bona-fides into question, but can we just ask you whether you might agree with us that the sense of historical significance that may well be afforded to this pub just happens to get even a little bit diluted when you factor in the fact that that sitting just atop the pub is Dublin 8’s most authentic, lively Italian dining emporium – La Dolce Vita. I mean, pizze di Napoli, fettuccine alla carbonara and spaghetti al pomodoro, don’t exactly scream saoirse na hÉireann now do they? Maybe it qualifies under ‘our gallant allies in Europe’. I don’t know.

It’s probably just me. But when I first pushed back the door of the bar in The Patriot’s Inn of a November evening, the first thing to grace the olfactory plains of my internal workings was the pungent bouquet of basil, garlic and tomato. All fine things in their own right and great in the appropriate time and place, but when a man has the desire for porter, he need not be enticed by certain aromas, and these are certainly included with those. I, and others so discerning, have been known to leave pubs for less.

But this night, it would take more than the smell of decent Italian gnosh to move me and my companions, as we were there to get this pub well and truly ticked from our list. Making our way to the bar, we hastily retrieved a few pints and set about getting a table. Finding our way to a free table toward the back, we listened a while to the music which emanated from the lounge before tucking into the pints before us. While the enjoyment of these was impacted by the smell of food, it was agreed that they were of an acceptable standard and a decent price, too. (€4.80 in November 2018… we don’t often get the chance to get out to Kilmainham)

As we discussed Italian involvement in the course of Irish History and considered floating to the owners – the idea of changing the restaurant to French cuisine for the 1798 tie-in, we came to notice two lads who had become uneasy about themselves and were up and down from their seats a lot. Deciding that they were probably looking for something, we left them to it before they interjected and asked the entire enclave, which we were sat in, if they had seen a ring about the place. Having received entirely negative responses to their queries, one of the men informed us of how it was the other’s wedding ring which had gone missing, the other having only been married a few short weeks and out on his first few pints, sans-missus, since the big day.

It was at this moment that a beautiful act of male telepathy occurred. We all knew that losing a wedding ring was bad. But losing one on the first few pints away from the wife – fatal. Every person harbouring a Y chromosome in that room knew that this fella’s entire drinking future was at stake. So with that, we all mobilised. Recruits seemed to appear from all angles. And after a solid ten or fifteen minutes of ransacking the back alcove of this bar, a Tolkien-esque roar could be heard throughout the town of Kilmainham as this newlywed was reunited with his wedding band once more. And even better was the fact that after such upheaval, I’d no longer found myself bothered by the smell of Italian cooking. We sank a pint or two with the newlywed afterwards to celebrate before heading down the road.

The Patriot isn’t a bad pub by any stretch of the imagination. But they could do with leaving the pasta upstairs.

January 17, 2020
The Old Royal Oak: Kilmainham Lane

Dublin! It’s a city, if the annals of internet comment sections are to be believed, that divides opinion. And while pub-dwellers prone to over-romanticisation, such as ourselves, are ten a penny, there’s also a hefty cohort out there in the world who refuse to base their opinions of our native city on anything other than the darker end of the full spectrum.

Though our official line is one attesting to the craic and beauty being in plentiful supply, we’re not so ignorant as to equate Dublin to some utopia, and even we like to take the road out sometimes in search of an atmosphere where urbanity doesn’t abound. Where settings are a little, if not a lot, more rural.

Thankfully, when such pangs kick in and when time or money won’t allow, we can achieve something akin to a rural encounter without having to travel so far. Sometimes an experience bordering on bucolic can be had mere minutes from the city centre – we’re referring, of course, to a pub which rightly calls itself an authentic country pub in Kilmainham – The Old Royal Oak.

In researching the name of this pub, I can’t say with any great degree of confidence that we’ve managed to establish its exact origin. Some say that there must be a tie with the nearby Royal Hospital, given its inclusion of the word royal, but in the course of our research, we’ve come to establish our own particular theory. We have previously touched upon the genesis of some modern pub names in our post about The Deer’s Head, and similar to that, we’ve found ourselves looking back toward our old colonial neighbour for answers. You see, it so happens that an abundance of pubs across in the UK have names containing any given permutation of the words royal, oak and old. And as you might imagine, there’s a good reason for this.

Way back in the 1600s, during the English Civil War, Royalists and Parliamentarians were having a bit of a disagreement. And this disagreement was of such severity that it brought about the need for a battle in the town of Worcester. Possibly about governance, possibly about sauce, who knows? Anyway, King Charles, the king to be, not the dog, being head of the Royalists and a bit of a useless prick to boot, decided that he had scant chance of survival when pitted against Lord Protector and cunt of the last millennium – Oliver Cromwell, Ollie being head-honcho of the opposing side. Opting to hide away from all the bloodshed, Charlie sought refuge – and as the story goes, found it in the relative sanctuary of a big oak tree.

Fast forward a decade or so, and the civil war is over, Chaz is back on the throne and is regaling everyone with the tale of the time he was shielded from danger by a big bastard of an oak tree. So Brits being Brits – they start writing songs and naming boozers after this Royal Oak, as it had been dubbed.

Let it be known that our guess, educated by the fact that The Old Royal Oak was first opened as a pub when British rule still reigned over this country, is that this pub took its name, as so many others across the Irish Sea did, from that tree in the middle of England. And if it didn’t, then so be it. We still managed to get around to calling Ollie Cromwell a bollox in at least one of the things we’ve posted on this website.

The Oaker is a pub that would seem to espouse the principle that less is more – the bar, a one-roomed, undivided space, is characterised by its simplicity. Upon entrance, you’ll observe low seating on your left and a medium-sized bar to the right. Seating, while not in short supply, is limited, and when the place fills up, it fills up fast. We commandeered a few stools up near the bar just in the nick of time when we last visited. Decoration is made up of the usual cavalcade of ephemera you might find in traditional pubs – paintings and pictures of local landscapes and landmarks, old drink adverts, framed jerseys and a few flags on the ceiling too, just for good measure.

I’d made my first visit here in the company of Pintman №5, who rates this pub as his favourite in the city. My fears of disagreeing with him were quickly allayed as we settled into a few pints and he pointed out an elderly lady perched on a stool at the end of the bar. Describing her as “a little dreamboat”, he informs me that she is the owner, or related to the owner as it may be.

When the time comes to use the Jaxx, I’m reminded by my companion to inspect the snug while en route – and I’m glad that I take this instruction. Peering through the unassuming door, I find myself in a space that is more family–living room than pub-snug. Its cosy inhabitants, all of whom are glued to a match on the TV, react to my interruption with the same sort of perplexity you might to a perfect stranger wandering into your own sitting room. I return to the bar, extolling the cosiness of this snug to my companions before demanding of them that we sit in there upon our next visit. We will!

Pintwise, we’re in dream territory here €4.80 on our last visit (which was Nov 2018, way too long ago) and a decent skinful sunk with great pleasure. Pintman №5 indulged in a toasty on that occasion too, and it looked the part.

Out and ou,t this is a fine establishment. One I wish was in more of a convenient location relative to a northsider such as myself. The pub too is also a great lesson for all new and prospective publicans thinking of going for that big revamp. Simplicity can be effective if the place is run right.

December 27, 2019