The Irish Pub

First published (PUB-lished - ho, ho) in the Western People on Monday.

The trailer for a new documentary film about the Irish pub has just been released online. Movie trailers can often flatter to deceive, but this one looks like a gem.

The movie, called The Irish Pub, will be released on the fourth of October, and it documents and celebrates that cornerstone of Irish life that is the local pub. If we were Italians, we would perhaps drink thimbles of coffee while meeting our neighbours and discussing events of the day. France is noted for its street cafes, where the impossibly chic drink the impossibly expensive. But the Gael goes to the pub, for better or worse.

There are those whom drink doesn’t suit and are well advised to stay away from it. But for those who know that all things have their season the pub is a place of enchantment and wonder. If its time has passed, due to changes in culture, legislation or whatever else, we will have lost something of ourselves.

What is a pub, anyway? Is it just a place that sells drink that can be consumed on the premises? We have a notion that pubs in Ireland have been the same since old God’s time, but this isn’t true. The pub is like Gaelic football – always changing, and yet always remaining the same.

The lounge bar of the 1970s was the equivalent of the handpass in the football of that era. An interloper from another culture, designed to make the ancient pastimes more modern and appealing but interlopers that appear very strange now when we look back on them, either on TG4 Gold or bootleg boxsets of The Riordans.

In the 1970s, the lounge was as linked to the pub as the fig in the fig roll. You were very unlikely to find the one without the other. The lounge was for women or men who had washed themselves before the last full moon. The pub was for the rest of the populace. You turned left or right, according to your station in life, and drank fancy lager or old-fashioned beer and stout according to where you were.

Evolution has seen the lounge bars wither and die, and they are little mourned. The mixing of the sexes is to be encouraged and celebrated – we understand each other so little in the first place that we can’t get to know each other well enough, and a soft touch of the hard drop is great social lubricant. Unfortunately, the lounge bar, that used to be part of a pub, has mutated into an entity of its own.

It would be an insult to bars to call these places bars, as opposed to pubs. It would be more accurate to call them venues. And they’re all very well, if you like eating your dinner off a board, standing up with your arm curled around your drink to protect it, and my Lady Gaga blasting out of speakers in every blessed corner of the rom.

But don’t tell me you’re in a pub, because you really aren’t. Venues have their uses – not least of which is mopping up people who wouldn’t be much fun in a place that didn’t have enough mirrors for their needs – but pubs they’re not.

The establishments featured in The Irish Pub movie are not like this. Drawn from all over the country, including our own most excellent Leonard’s of Lahardane, with the bar on the left and the groceries on the right, the movie celebrates all that’s best about the Irish pub.

The trailer, which is only ninety seconds long, features soundbites from barmen and bar owners talking about their pubs. And they all understand that one fundamental thing about pubs that so many people don’t understand. Drink is important in a pub, of course, but it is the company that’s paramount.

There was a coffee-table book published a few years ago about the Irish pub, with lovely pictures of Victorian architecture in places like the Stag’s Head in Dublin or The Crown in Belfast. And that’s all fine, but you can’t really call a pub a pub unless there are people in it. Otherwise, it’s just a room, like any other.

For rural people, getting to the pub is an issue. It’s hard to get there and harder to get home but there is no good in sitting by yourself when the long winter draws in. We read soft chat in papers about buses for rural areas, but people don’t always realise just how expansive a route that would be. A helicopter might cover the catchment area, but I wouldn’t like to be the man or woman who has to valet the chopper after it’s been spinning people full of porter around Erris in the black dead of night, buffeted by winds from the broad Atlantic.

So why not try a bit of lateral thinking and introduce a bike-to-pub scheme, along the lines of the bike-to-work? The government pays half the price of the bicycle provided the buyer commits to using it for getting to and from the pub, where he or she may enjoy the social interaction that is unique to the culture. It would apply only in otherwise isolated rural areas where a reliable taxi service is an impossibility.

Of course, there are certain dangers inherent in cycling under the influence. The M4 is no place to be full of pints up on a bike with articulated lorries whizzing past. However, if a person were to keel over on a country road, the whitethorns and whins would first ease his fall, and then sober him up a biteen as the bushes did their thorny work. If anything, he or she would be better for the experience.

The bicycle, once so much a part of rural life, can return to the country lanes once more as the nation tops up with a few creamy ones after a hard day’s work and then cycles merrily home, bell tinkling all the way.

Dublin Bikes Are Great

The Dublin Bikes scheme is a triumph. There is no other word for it. Glitches aside, it’s hard to think of anything that’s been introduced in the city of Dublin that’s added so much to living in the city since Mary Harney did for the smog over twenty years ago.

An Spailpín Fánach spent his tenner on a year long ticket and seldom have ten notes been better invested.

Getting around between the canals has been a curse of the city. Walking is exhausting and worse, criminally boring. The buses would be grand if they turned up, but waiting in the rain at a bus stop for a bus that doesn’t show is not the best way to spend one’s day. If you take the car you either have nowhere to park or else pay shocking fees for the privilege.

Dublin Bikes knock all that on the head. Simply visit the bikestand, key in your details and you’re away. The extra charges only kick in after half an hour, and in half an hour you’ve cycled to where-ever you wanted to go in the first place. Any longer, take the bus.

It takes a while to get used to the bikes, of course. They’re quite heavy, and balanced towards the front. This makes the initial spin quite a wobbly one but, like so many things in life, you get used to it. And then a tremendous sense of liberation overwhelms you, as you realise that travelling the city has suddenly become simple and painless.

For instance, suppose you are standing outside the Mountjoy Hotel, feeling rather grateful that you are not incarcerated therein, when an urgent text is received that the choice and noblest spirits of the age are drinking that strong, sweet porter served by the white-shirted, bow-tied chaplains of Neary’s of Chatham Street. Crossing the street to the Mater gives you access to the bike, and ten downhill minutes later you are parking it in the rack shown in the photograph at the top of this post, lips being licked already in eager anticipation.

There are thorns on the rose, certainly. The relationship between the bus lane and the bike lane is rather like the relationship between Mrs Cheryl Cole and the rest of Girls Aloud. Of equal status in theory, but if La Cole ever throws a strop there’s only going to be one winner. This makes cycling up O’Connell Street somewhat fraught as the buses loom over the shoulder, but the traffic restrictions that more or less ban anything but buses and bikes from O’Connell Street do make it easier to deal with.

Tremendous caution is also advised when crossing the LUAS lines, a manoeuvre that should only be performed at right angles. Your correspondent had the misfortune to cycle parallel to a LUAS line in the IFSC last week, and ended up by jamming the front wheel in the sunken track, thus catapulting myself off the machine and coming to a hopping stop some yards distant, like an American football wide receiver trying to stay inbounds after a catch.

But these are minor matters compared to the incredible freedom of being able to traverse the city quickly and painlessly. The editorial in the Sunday Times called for the Dublin Bikes scheme to be expanded all over the city, and An Spailpín is happy to second that proposal. Like the iPhone, once you sign up its impossible to imagine how you ever managed without one. Roll on, Dublin Bikes, roll on.








Technorati Tags: Ireland, Dublin, Dublin Bikes, Dublin Bus

Dublin Bikes

Like Miss Kelly Brook here on our left, An Spailpín Fánach dreams of the wind in his hair. Or at least, what’s left of his hair.

The Dublin Bikes initiative has your diarist’s imagination in thrall. Just as John Keats was taken to new and unexplored worlds when he first looked into George Chapman’s translation of Homer, so An Spailpín Fánach dreams of travelling in the realms of gold, and many goodly states and kingdoms seeing.

Freed from shackled traffic, I dream of whizzing around the city on that most noble, that most Irish of forms of transport, the bicycle. I would take a spin along the south side, perhaps, through the great Georgian facades of Merrion Square and Fitzwilliam Square. I could roll across the canal at Mount Street Bridge, salute the bould Paddy Kavanagh, immortalised in bronze forever, and then carry out his own instructions and look out for his ghost on the Pembroke Road, dishevelled with shoes untied.

Or I could criss-cross the Liffey in the manner of that other great song, and follow the pursuit of the man who was so badly smitten with the Spanish Lady, up and around by the Gloucester Diamond and ‘round by Napper Tandy’s house.

I’d be out of the saddle pumping the pedals like a man who feared hellhounds on his trail at the Gloucester Diamond, of course, but still. Dublin has been lacking short hop city centre transport since Ryan Tubridy’s grandfather put an end to the trams and the Dublin Bikes scheme is as close the municipality has come to fixing that ancient error.

So I made my way as far as the bike depot beside Pearse Street last week, and went for it. The annual sub is cheaper, of course, but the website says you must wait fourteen days for your card, and An Spailpín is not as young as he was. I shoved in my flexible friend, and waited for something to happen.

Nothing happened. The whole thing froze. I didn’t know if my details had been read, if my card had been scanned, or what happened.

I turned around. There was a citizen behind me, with his mobile phone in his hand.

“Same thing happened me,” he said. “I had to ring them back. I’ve been here for ten minutes.”

I looked at my credit card. I looked at the machine. I looked at the bikes, all lined up at a rakish angle, gleaming and new, with solid frames, handy front baskets and snazzy blue mudguards on the back wheel. I bid my dreams of freedom adieu, turned up my collar and walked on, hoping to catch a bus on the quays.





Technorati Tags: Ireland, Dublin, Dublin Bikes, Dublin Bus