St. Patrick’s Day Death of the Irish pub

By Pól Ó Conghaile

It is not so unusual for two men to argue passionately in a pub, but in Barney Kiernan’s of Little Britain Street, things were getting quite out of hand.

An odd pair had been riling each other there for the better part of an hour. They had volubly debated all the old chestnuts — dying for the cause, the shoneens who can’t speak their own language, the revival of ancient Gaelic sports. The smaller of the two drew gestures in the air with his cigar, irritating all and sundry with his pedantic inquiries. His counterpart was gigantic, a patriot in the extreme and, in his time, a dab hand at the shot put. At any rate, trouble had been brewing for a while and so it was of little surprise to anyone when he lost the rag and let fly with a biscuit tin, narrowly missing his diminutive companion.

Leopold Bloom and the Citizen have been arguing like this since 1922, the year in which James Joyce’s "Ulysses" was published. While their debates have survived, however, their boozy stage has not. Nos. 8, 9 and 10 Little Britain Street, the tight row of Georgian houses that once comprised the 200-year-old pub, have been demolished. Since late 1999, a nondescript apartment building stands in their place, nameless.

Where Barney Kiernan’s fell, others are following. Mullingar House in Chapelizod, the site of H.C.E.’s nocturnal meanderings in "Finnegans Wake," has been completely refurbished. The White Horse Inn on Burgh Quay, one of the city’s first early houses, has been torn down and replaced by a much larger, cosmopolitan take. Kehoe’s, Toner’s and the Waterloo Inn have all passed from the hands of their proprietors. Where once there were pubs, now there are properties.

Moreover, though 29 percent of the Irish population lives in Dublin, the capital hosts just 9 percent of all pub licenses. In the absence of correctional measures, the "superpub" — a spacious, themed model geared toward Ireland’s younger, more affluent movers and shakers — has been born. Its huge economies of scale have left the traditional pub with little room for maneuver, and fears long since cozily whispered have spilled onto streets with their freshly displaced clientele: The Irish pub is a dying breed.

What is an Irish pub?

Of course, in order to establish what exactly is dying, one must first agree as to what an Irish pub actually is. This is not such a simple task. On one hand, there is the stereotype: the grubby haven of gossip that has gained such popularity in folklore. This pub is a place where, as author Peter Costello describes, "plots are hatched, plays and pop groups are talked into and out of existence and love affairs are started and ended. Songs are sung, rumors embroidered, jokes swapped and the rigors of the outside world soothed, with a glass of something to lubricate the famous Dublin wit." In the companionable dark of this place, you can drink any pint you like as long as it’s Guinness.

Others have different ideas. "It depends on the kind of tradition you’re talking about," said Colm Quilligan, founder of the Dublin Literary Pub Crawl. "If it’s that booze-fueled, male-dominated pub where drinkers spat on the floor, smoked pipe tobacco, vomited when they had too much to drink and excluded women from the proceedings, then, naturally enough, that’s a tradition that should be shut off as quickly as possible. It should be remembered only for how awful it was."

However their opinions might differ, Costello and Quilligan are reading from the same blueprint. The long, polished wooden bars, huge mirrors and brass lamps still visible today in pubs like the Long Hall on South Great George’s Street date largely from the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Though initially working-class establishments, in a time of political unsettlement their usefulness as places of refuge quickly incorporated all sorts. "The Dubliner," as Joyce observed, "spends his time ceaselessly babbling in bars, pubs and whorehouses, never tiring of the concoction which he is served: whiskey and home rule."

His description is as accurate as it is sarcastic. Dublin had yet to experience the joys of suburbanization, and its pubs went a ways toward creating a local sense of community. In fact, the government once convened in Davy Byrne’s of Duke Street, and Michael Collins is reputed to have conducted much of his war against England from Dan Dunne’s in Donnybrook.

Mostly, of course, pubs were thronged with Ireland’s governed. "They were all male preserves," Quilligan said. "Cozy as an alligator tank, as someone once said — but that kind of social life was part and parcel of Dublin in those days. It was a small city and you had these so-called Dublin characters, like Paddy Kavanagh, from Monaghan, and Flann O’Brien, from County Tyrone, living very close to the pubs."

In the 1940s and ’50s, Quilligan points out, Dublin was a calm, unhurried place. Snugs bustled, and a singular mix of regulars, owner and staff made pubs a national institution by virtue of a character unique to each. "A fine place to be my whole life talking out with swearing Christians," as Synge wrote in "Playboy of the Western World." Patrons like Brendan Behan and J.P. Donleavy would have heartily agreed. This was their world. It was an easy and often a raucous one, and it seemed set to last.

It wasn’t. "In the 1950s nothing too much happened," as one publican, Frank Gaffney of the Summit Inn on Howth, remembered. "At that time there was no ice maker, no coolers, no central heating, no gas for the beer, no fans. The price of the pint stayed steady at about one and sixpence. Later on, it sneaked up to two shillings. Then it went to 2/1d and that was the last straw. There was war."

The global pub

It may make sense to argue that the war started in earnest when the Irish pub first left Ireland. Emigrants had a hard enough time leaving their friends and family and they were damned if the same fate was going to befall the pint of plain. Home came slowly through the post, but it took only a minute to arrive via the taps, and, indeed, drinking dens represented an ideal forum for the displaced to share their experience and imagine themselves anew as a race. Of course, the resultant charm and atmosphere eventually strayed beyond the communities from which it sprang and today, in its own way, the globalized Irish pub has become as marketable a product as McDonald’s or Burger King.

"There is nothing to equal the ambiance of an Irish pub," announces the web site of the Irish Pub Company, which is associated with more than 400 pubs in 37 countries. "There is nothing to match its casual and attractive sociability. The Irish have always known that."

Conor Kenny, group sales director with the outfit, believes the pubs it sells are as authentic as possible. The opportunity to spend an evening drinking in Dublin, without ever boarding a plane, is as attractive to drinkers as it is profitable to investors. He offers Italian restaurants as a similarity. People eat Italian the world over because they can reliably expect an attractive atmosphere, a pleasant setting and a good standard of cuisine. Ditto people who choose to "drink" the Irish way.

Perhaps it’s not so odd, then, that in Singapore, Father Flannagan’s pub advertises the best pint of plain east of the River Liffey. Nor that, in a time of economic hardship in Russia, Kitty O’Shea’s pub in Moscow charges $6 for a Guinness. Nor, even, that a wealthy Texan businessman recently paid the Irish Pub Company $500,000 for an Irish pub in his native state.

"We’ve sold pubs everywhere from Siberia to China," a spokesperson for the group said. "But this was the first time we’ve ever been asked if we accept credit cards."

Leaving in the first place was one thing, but the Irish pub has come home to roost in a surreal way. In an effort to accommodate visiting diaspora and the tourist industry as a whole, many of the same pubs that jettisoned their original furnishings in the 1970s and ’80s have re-refurbished, as it were, in accordance with visitors’ expectations of what an Irish pub should look like. Ironically, many are not up to that same standard.

Moreover, the city to which visitors are returning is vastly different from the one they left. Ireland is now the fastest-growing economy in Europe. Its younger population is affluent to an extent that would have been impossible to predict even five years ago. Two figures should adequately reflect this: In 1999, the Irish exchequer recorded a budget surplus of more than £2 billion. In January of this year, new car sales amounted to more than £20 million per day.

The Celtic Cubs’ wallets have swollen then, as have their horizons — now surely so broad as to be unrecognizable to any drinker surviving from the 1950s. The number of pub licenses available in Ireland, however, has not. According to a 1998 Competition Authority Report, which examined the state of the industry, there are now 1,119 people per pub in Dublin, a figure contrasting severely with 260, for example, in Limerick. The price of a pint, too, is on average 25p higher than in rural areas. Combining the two — few licenses and an increasingly affluent clientele — leaves extant pubs in a position to achieve massive turnovers, the corollary of which has been a marked increase in the value of their licenses.

"The demand for city premises has definitely shown a marked increase," agrees John Hughes of Gunne Commercial, one of the city’s leading Real Estate agencies. "There is no indication that prices are going anywhere other than up." The figures he quotes are themselves intoxicating. In the second quarter of last year alone, Whelan’s of Wexford Street sold for £3.5 million and the Waterloo Inn for £2 million. They are by no means alone. In that period alone, Dublin pub sales exceeded £40 million.

"Good puzzle would be to cross Dublin without passing a pub," Leopold Bloom muses at one point in "Ulysses," perhaps smilingly comfortable in the knowledge that a genuine Dubliner would not be seen dead attempting any such thing. But throughout the 1990s, a new kind of drinking emporium has been proliferating in the city, a kind designed to cram as many revelers as possible under the same licensed roof. A good puzzle in 2000, one might suggest, would be to cross Dublin without passing a superpub.

The superpub

Superpubs represent a major departure from the traditional drinking establishment of old. Where the character of the latter was largely defined by a single owner (Davy Byrne’s and John Kehoe’s, for example), gargantuan premises, such as the £3 million, African-themed Zanzibar on Ormond Quay, offer an opportunity for the die-hard businessman to achieve huge economies of scale. Owned by the O’Dwyer Group, which has several such ventures in the city, Zanzibar can hold 1,200 drinkers on four floors.

Nor is it alone. "There is a belief at the moment that if you open a shed in Dublin, it will do well," one Hugh O’Regan quipped in the Irish Independent recently. He should know: the 37-year-old former bank official owns an expanding superpub empire, which is now reckoned to net him more than £30 million a year. "Dublin is so vibrant, almost anything you do in the city seems to be well regarded," he said. "So I think we are just sharing in the success of how buoyant Dublin is at the moment."

Though notoriously reticent, O’Regan is believed to feel Dublin’s younger drinkers were growing weary of the traditional pub. Hence Pravda, one of his ventures on Liffey Street, which was created by designers who had previously worked on movie sets. The result is an undeniably popular multilevel bar positioned around a pseudo-Stalinist industrial theme. Effectively, Pravda blurs the difference between a pub and a café. As do O’Regan’s other ventures: Life, Hogan’s, Thomas Read’s and the £18 million Morrison Hotel.

Superpubs are a new departure for Ireland, granted. But are they what the customer wants? Do they represent an opening up of society, or the triumph of personality-free zones?

"Old-style pubs valued privacy," said Kevin Cullen, chief of the Boston Globe’s London Bureau. "Their snug offered secluded corners in which to nurse pints and peruse the newspaper. The aim of young professionals who congregate in these bars now is to be seen."

On the other hand, as Chris Lowry of the Irish Independent argued, these huge, themed ventures "have transformed Dublin’s jaded, often stilted and self-satisfied pub landscape and given it a European look, feel and tempo that a city with such lofty aspirations demands and deserves."

John Hughes of Gunne Commercial believes there is room for both. "Without a doubt there is still a demand for the traditional-style Irish pub," he said. "We have Slattery’s on Grand Canal Street up for auction shortly, for example, and the interest there is phenomenal. Its traditional layout is appealing to a purchaser. Obviously they’re thinking that would appeal to a customer as well. The market is there for both types of property."

Dublin Corporation, however, has other ideas. Having perceived what it recognizes as a decline in the number of traditional, unaltered pubs in the city, its planning department recently refused O’Regan permission for a new superpub on Suffolk Street. Inspired by the chaos in Temple Bar, where such developments are getting boisterous and out of hand — not to mention other risqué projects such as the conversion of St. Mary’s Church (1697), the oldest surviving parish church in Dublin, into a superpub — officials say they feel the trend is killing balance. And at such a sensitive stage in its development, Dublin needs balance more than ever.

"There [are] no more than two dozen pubs out of the nearly 1,000 licensed premises in Dublin that retain any semblance of their former shoddy grandeur," David Hanly writes in his novel "In Guilt and Glory." "Owners old and new [have] succumbed to a crass impulse to toss out the heavy dark counters, the black, brass-topped pint pullers, the worn wooden floors with knots like little hills." These have been replaced, Hanly argues, "by a chill compendium of Formica and steel, cream and purple and gold, and carpets, which [fling] up a stifling odor after four months on the floor."

Fighting the good fight

Thankfully, however, those two dozen pubs are fighting a good fight. Take McDaid’s of Harry Street. Once host to the city morgue, the pub features heavily in J.P. Donleavy’s "The Ginger Man," is the site for some activity in Joyce’s short story "Grace," and played ebullient host to Behan’s court throughout the 1960s. In fact, so notorious was the den in its prime, the editor of the Irish Times from 1934 to 1954, R.M. Smylie, was sufficiently curious to dislodge himself from his customary perch at the Palace on Fleet Street to see what all the fuss was about. What he saw on that one visit remains the stuff of legend.

"A fight over the use of spondees was going on in one corner between two wild men in duffel coats," John Ryan, then editor of the literary journal Envoy and himself a publican, remembered. "Brendan Behan was standing on a table bawling his rendition of ‘I was Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, and Gainor Christ, the Ginger Man, was getting sick, evidently into somebody else’s pint." Smylie downed his drink and left, disgusted.

"If you go into those pubs you can see the features almost exactly as they were on the day they were built," Colm Quilligan said. "You had a similar tradition in Soho in London, but a lot of the writers were banned here under the Censorship Act of 1927. Official Ireland didn’t want to know about these people. They had to come to pubs looking for journalists to see their work in print."

Not all were successful. "We can only imagine what novels and poems and plays drifted and lodged with the nicotine in the ceilings of those hostelries," as John Ryan put it. But they would soon have to be unsuccessful elsewhere. McDaid’s sold last year for £2.9 million, a phenomenal 4.7 times its annual turnover, and though the current owners look happy with the pub as is, others aren’t. The Palace, Kehoe’s and Mulligan’s are increasingly rare birds. Frank Gaffney’s war, it seems, is witnessing its last battle.

Still, the $64,000 question remains. Is that a good or a bad thing?

At one level, there is acceptance. "A self-respecting woman wouldn’t have dreamed of going into a public bar back then because, first of all, it stank," Quilligan said. "Second of all, you had men spitting on the floor. Women have, in a sense, set the agenda for the opening up of pubs since the 1960s. The whole thing is being driven by a new sense of cool."

But there is sadness too. "You can go into a real Irish pub like Mulligan’s or Toner’s in Dublin and you can see the difference," said David Keane of Keane, Murphy Duff architects. "You can never reproduce pubs like that because of the way they’ve grown over the years. They’re like an old glove."

For others, conviviality and begrudgery will survive wherever there are people. For them, Ireland is an organic place, and change should be embraced. And it may not be such a bad thing that the traditional Irish pub recipe — nefarious and cruel, gritty and beautiful — will continue, like Joyce’s Dublin, to live in the same place it always has: the imagination.