The latest episode of my podcast, Three Castles Burning, is all about the Pierrepoint family. The name Pierrepoint in Ireland was once notorious, they being the primary hangmen in the country over decades. Amongst other jobs, Tom Pierrepoint and his nephew Albert were responsible for the hanging of Charlie Kerins, the IRA Chief of Staff, at Mountjoy in 1944. The rebel song honouring Kerins laments how ‘the hangman from England came over the sea.’

The main text for the episode was Albert Pierrepoint’s memoir, Executioneer. Famously, Albert came to oppose the death penalty, insisting that ‘capital punishment, in my view, achieved nothing except revenge.’ The book was a best-seller, people have a morbid curiosity for these things.

What I didn’t expect to find within it was so much of interest on the subject of pubs and booze more broadly. He recalls visiting the Guinness Brewery with his uncle following a hanging in Mountjoy, at a time when brewery tours were conducted more informally, and his father had a friend working there: ‘We called at the brewery and my uncle drank a sample or two. I had one glass myself, of some special new porter they were introducing, but I found that it not agree with me.’ The level of drinking on the job itself could be intense, with a bottle of whiskey routinely produced by a prison warden or Governor. After his first Mountjoy job, Albert recalled:

I suddenly realised that the chief prison officer was holding a glass of whiskey out towards me. He had somehow produced a full bottle and some glasses, and was pouring drinks for all the witnesses.

More than one hangman (including Albert’s father) lost their job in circumstances surrounding drink, but he had no such demons, and even went into the industry of selling it. Albert later juggled his career as a hangman with the life of a publican, running the unfortunately named Help The Poor Struggler in Oldham. The name predated Pierrepoint, and his becoming a publican was news even to TIME magazine, who wrote about the economic precarity of life as a hangman:

That was something for Albert (“Yungg Alber”) Pierrepoint to ponder, when he joined his uncle Thomas as Britain’s second Senior Hangman. He too had all the makings of an expert executioner—his job on “Lord Haw-Haw” had been first rate; but “Yungg Alber” was a ripe 37, had recently been married, and a hangman’s income was inadequate. They did not hang many chaps in Britain.

He could fall back on his job as a greengrocer’s assistant at F. Harrison, Ltd. in Manchester, which he had held for 18 years. But, though it was steady enough, he dreamed of bigger things; once, when a reporter came to interview him at the greengrocery, he puckishly pretended that he was someone else, that “Alber” had moved away. Where? To a farm in Essex, said “Yungg Alber” wistfully.

Last week, he finally took a decisive step to better himself. He did not quite manage the farm in Essex, but he became the licensee of a pub in Oldham, Lancashire. “Yungg Alber” was a man of feeling; like his uncle, he always took pride in making his victim’s grim death throes as light and brief as possible. His new pub had an appropriate name. It was called: “Help the Poor Struggler.”

By all accounts, Help the Poor Struggler was a good establishment. When the man on the other side of the counter had ended at least 430 lives, people might behave themselves. Still, he discouraged what we might now call ‘dark tourism’. He was known to end the occasional night with a verse of Danny Boy on the piano, and in Executioneer he even recalls sharing a drink with an Irish customer, who told him he had been involved in the Republican movement. The man said he and his comrades had sought to detain Pierrepoint before a Mountjoy hanging, presumably that of Charlie Kerins. All that was now in the rear view mirror.

A rather crass rumour was spread in the press that Albert’s establishment included a sign at the bar ordering ‘no hanging around the bar.’ It didn’t, and Pierrepoint very much sought to keep his two lives separate. I suspect he was trying to shock his readers when he said ‘I found that I could take a three o’clock plane from Dublin after conducting an execution there and be opening my bar without comment at half past five.’ There were very few hangings occurring in Ireland by the time Pierrepoint was slinging pints.

Help the Poor Struggler is no more, demolished in the name of progress and road widening in the 1990s. Those seeking a pub with a Mountjoy prison connection will find it closer to home on Dorset Street, where The Auld Triangle takes its name from the triangular bell used to awaken prisoners in the Joy, made famous in the song of prison lark Dickie Shannon, which Brendan Behan incorporated into a play. Behan never claimed to write it, but it is now very much his song in the popular memory of the city.

Or, if you’d prefer to meet some prison officers, try The Hut in Phibsboro. In Majella Moynihan’s memoir A Guarded Life, she recalls it as ‘a bar on the Phibsborough Road which was popular with prison guards from Mountjoy.’ It still is.

The Belfast of the 1790s was a city of great radicalism, something evidenced by the banners carried aloft in its Bastille Day processions. Along with the heroes of the French revolution and Tom Paine, denunciations of slavery were proudly carried by processionists. One celebrated banner showed the image of Dr. Benjamin Franklin, along with his famed words ‘Where Liberty is – there is my country.’

The Society of United Irishmen - the Irish expression of the Age of Revolution - was not initially a proscribed or even a revolutionary movement, seeking reform at first. In time, it was proscribed and driven underground. In its infancy, it met in the open, with a plaque at the Eagle Tavern in Dublin (beside the current Irish Film Institute) testament to those times. In Belfast, the movement had several favourite haunts, including Dr Franklin’s Tavern in the Sugarhouse Entry.

The Entries in Belfast are a series of laneways that dot the city, important in the commercial and geographic history of the city. Many of these have been revitalised in recent times. Franklin was just one hero of the age with a tavern named after him, others included the French General Dumouriez. In Timothy Murtagh’s recent history of radical politics amongst Irish artisan workers, he includes a great line from an informer who spent a lot of time in these taverns, complaining that the radicals of Belfast would ‘seldom say much until they were nearly drunk and by the time I get them in that plight, I am little better myself.’

In this world of radicalism, all kinds of toasts were raised. Popular toasts included those celebrating the spirit of the French mob, or wishing ‘The fate of Louis to all crown’d heads’, in reference to the Guillotine. A popular and sarcastic toast in Belfast and Dublin was often raised ‘To King George the Last.’

The drinking of many of the leading lights of the movement is well-documented, even by themselves. It’s difficult not to feel a fondness for Theobald Wolfe Tone having read his diaries. Later, the republican Ernie O’Malley would recall of his childhood:

Amongst the books at home was a copy of Wolfe Tone’s Autobiography, published by his son in America in 1826. The leaves had not been cut. I read Tone slowly... Other leaders, with the exception of Hugh O’Neill, had been abstractions; at school we had read of them in relation to events; they had nothing to do with living. Tone was the first human note; ‘drunk again’ in his diary meant much: it brought him down to mortal level.

How wonderful to see the name of Franklin returning to Sugarhouse Entry in Belfast, with publican Stephen Magorrian converting the old cold room of the Northern Whig into a new premises carrying the name of Benjamin Franklin. Magorrian told the Irish News:

I was aware of the Dr Franklin Tavern having been there and so when the council decided to open the entry again, we thought this has to be an opportunity.

Peggy Barclay, proprietor of the earlier tavern, prided herself on the quality of the oysters in her establishment, a later history of the city recalling the premises as ‘the immortal Peggy Barclay’s Oyster House.’ While oysters fell out of favour somewhat in Victorian Ireland - viewed as a food of the poor - they were at the height of their popularity in the 1790s. Today, a few pints and a plate of oysters toasting Tom Paine down a Belfast laneway sounds very tempting indeed.

Breweriana - the collecting of historic items relating to beers and public houses - is quite the rabbit hole to get lost in.

I’m guilty of a little bit of it, with an advertisement for O’Connell’s Dublin Ale and some classic Guinness pub labels taking pride of place at home. For some people, it’s all about the beautiful advertising mirrors that once dotted Publand, fine hand-painted efforts that now stand testimony not only to lost distilleries and breweries, but to skilled craftsmanship.

Willie Aherne, third-generation proprietor of The Palace Bar on Fleet Street, enjoys these things too. Indeed, The Palace itself is something of a museum to Publand Past, from the ephemeral to the magnificent. Around the corner on the quays, his new pub Bill Aherne’s has provided a home to more of the Aherne collection, but I was intrigued to see an original 1960s Guinness tap box there recently.

The story of the arrival of draught beer in our pubs has been told well, especially by Boak & Bailey and Beervana. Nitrogen transformed the pint forever. Not everyone was pleased, with a Weights and Measures Inspector who visited his local in Bristol feeling that the new head and creamy froth was short-selling him on his pint, even taking the issue to the courts. At home, the press asked barmen and drinkers how they felt, with a Dublin docker in Mulligan’s insisting ‘it looks better and tastes better with the head.’

The Bristol case made it as far as the New York Times, who told readers:

In England, draft beer is served by pulling big black levers like those that operate railway signals. The glasses are filled with a splash in what looks like abandon. Some of the liquid runs over and back into the tank. A bit more is sloshed onto the counter.

When the customer gets the drink he derives almost as much pleasure from studying it, all frothy at the brim, as he does from drinking it.

Today, there’s a very lucrative market in copycat Guinness Breweriana, in particular where John Gilroy’s zoo animals are concerned. The original tap box though is simplicity itself in design, quieter than the loud red, black and cream we’re accustomed to seeing, and to see one in operation is rare.

So, the Guinness we enjoy today is the child of the late 1950s, rolled out nationwide in the 1960s. Yet some things have changed, and not for the better. I’ve long had a feeling that pints are often too cold now, and while Guinness Extra Cold is thankfully largely a thing of the past (relegated to the purgatory of Wetherspoon’s in Britain), the rich flavours of a pint are often missing in the age of the super-coolers.

As a bit of a novelty, Bill Aherne’s is now running a room temperature keg through the old tap box. Keeping the Guinness away from the cold room, it’s certainly noticeable that:

1. The pint takes considerably longer to settle, as the surge of bubbles behaves surprisingly differently to what we’re used to watching.

2. There is a depth of taste to it which is lost when the pint is too cold.

It’s worth saying the vast majority of stout served in the pub is in the cold room, and this is just an experiment of sorts through one tap, should people wish to try it.

One of the most unusual pub names in London is surely The Charlotte Despard, which commemorates a suffragette, communist and proud Irish republican. Born in 1844 and raised in Kent, Charlotte French knew a youth of significant privilege. Her brother, better known as Lord French, would rise through the ranks of the British armed forces, becoming Lord Lieutenant of Ireland at the height of the Irish War of Independence in 1921. Charlotte had first visited Ireland on her Honeymoon, but later the Irish struggle for independence completely captivated her, and she would throw all of her energy and personal wealth into it.

It was a source of no little embarrassment to Lord French that his sister was not merely a class traitor, but a national one. It was surely a peculiar thing for her to be standing for an Irish Republic, at a time when your brother was not merely opposed to it, but tasked with its suppression. The famous IRA leader Dan Breen recalled taking part in an ambush designed to kill Lord French, and how later:

I met Mrs. Despard and Mrs. Gonne MacBride in O'Connell Street in 1920 and Mrs. Despard was very annoyed with me for attacking her brother, John. But I said the only thing I was sorry for was that we did not get him.

She is today buried in the Republican Plot of Glasnevin Cemetery.

Despard Road in Archway (N19) is not named for Charlotte, but is instead named in homage of General John Despard (1744-1829) who fought against both the fledgling American and French Republics. It was a nice little nod to the deep Irish heritage of the district to put her name over the door instead.

Is the pub any good? God only knows. After a long and winding taxi journey, I arrived to the sign nobody wants to see on a premises: PRIVATE FUNCTION. It was, alas, the last hours of the last day of the pub. The woman on the door seemed in a sad enough mood, and just a few former staff and regulars were sitting around. It’s always a sad thing when a local pub closes, for anyone familiar with either side of the counter.Not wanting to attend a wake uninvited, I took the hint and went in a different direction, just glad to have seen its signage which - I thought - could soon vanish. More on this below. I can’t imagine another member of the Irish Friends of Soviet Russia will grace a pub sign in London in a hurry.

Walking back towards the Holloway Road, I passed through the recently renamed Navigator Square, a nice little touch that pays tribute to the Irish navvies, the men who built London. There are still some really excellent Irish public houses in the district, The Prince Edward being especially warm, right down to the friendly Waterford barwoman. It is packed full of Victoriana, and a great and curious mix of Irish and English decorative features.

The Lion on the corner of Holloway Road is a reminder of the changing times in this part of London. Once a very beloved pub for musical sessions amongst the local first and second generation Irish community, The Lion is now a Starbucks. While it’s great to have Navigator Square, there’s a sad anecdote in Rob Cowen’s recent book The North Road that tells us much about change. Having gone to see Navigator Square, he writes:

We stop to speak to an elderly woman crossing the road, who tells us she used to work as a nurse at the Whittington Hospital. London-born, but with the inherited Irish lilt. ‘It’s like they want us gone’, she says, pointing out the conversion of her beloved pub The Lion into a Starbucks. ‘It’s a shame. All the places we used to meet, you know? Three quid plus for a cup of coffee? They’re turning them into places we don’t have the money to go.

In positive news, I was delighted to hear the Terence MacSwiney Commemoration Committee in London moved quickly to secure the signage of The Charlotte Despard, noting that it and pubs like it mark an important chapter ‘in the history of the Irish in London, and in particular Irish republicanism in London.’

My thanks to Marcus Barnett for the tour of the pubs in this district.

The retirement of Soho publican Gaston Berlemont in 1989 was enough to win some column inches in Dublin, with the Sunday Independent even running a piece by the legendary Jeffrey Bernard (a journalist played on stage by Peter O’Toole) lamenting the end of an era:

...the French House has folded to all intents and purposes. Soho won’t be quite the same without Gaston. I shall miss the old boy. I feel quite sorry for the man who has taken over, though... What does worry me is will the worst of Gaston’s old customers try to invade the Coach and Horses?

Jeffrey needn’t have worried for the future of the pub, but he was wrong on ‘the man who has taken over.’ Now under the stewardship of landlady Leslie Lewis for more than thirty-five years, she has remained true to the spirit of the Soho institution. I spent a good chunk (maybe too good a chunk) of last Friday in it, as London sweltered in the heat. The weather meant that most people were in the mood to stand outside, leaving the pub itself unusually free to move around and soak in.

It serves only half pints, has no television or piped music, and hosts art exhibitions on its walls. Its hostility to mobile phones was picked up by the Irish Independent in 1999:

The French House pub in London’s Soho district warns patrons: ‘In the interest of good conversation, please refrain from using cellular telephones while in the French House.’

It is also home to one of the most impressive permanent art collections of any pub I’ve visited, including plenty of work from Irish photographer John Minihan. Minihan is currently enjoying a well deserved retrospective in the National Gallery of Ireland, where you can find his famous images of Beckett, Bacon and others alongside images from places as diverse as Athy and Havana. Soho is also part of Minihan’s world, and reflecting on his friendship with Guinness heir Garech Browne, he recalled how:

Garech loved Soho and was a good friend of Gaston Berlemont, proprietor of the French House. Gaston saw us all go through the many ups and downs that are part of the precarious structure of the artistic life and was always generous. He would change a cheque for me without a cheque guarantee card. Those little problems did not concern Garech, of course.

The pub’s association with Francis Bacon is recorded in many places, with the pub receiving a staggering number of mentions in Daniel Farson’s biography of the painter, Bacon recalling that ‘it attracted a lot of artists. It attracted lots of French people. And, for some reason, French people are much more intelligent than English people.’ Bacon was fond of raising a toast - a classic with the Edwardians but which became forever linked to his name - of ‘Champagne for my real friends. Real pain for my sham friends.'

The pub gets mention in Anthony Cronin’s Dead As Doornails, a book perhaps too often described merely as a memoir of ‘bohemian Dublin’, with a significant part of its action playing out in France, Soho and other environs. Cronin was a little less romantic than some about Soho:

Soho was largely inhabited by failures, the ruined men of the forties, whom the war had somehow confirmed in a natural dislike for the mere struggle for circumstantial success. If the whole structure is being blown up around you the name of the game is apt to change. In North Soho, during the war years, a true bohemia had flourished and, in a measure, a true anarchy prevailed.

Cronin, one of the great survivors of a drinking culture that claimed many lives, recalled going to Soho to ‘meet Lucian Freud, whom I had known in Dublin.’ Behan was certainly a regular in the French at that period, his unmistakable head appearing in the murals of former regulars, though Cronin recounted an encounter with Behan that isn’t particularly flattering there. He arrived into the pub, carrying a ‘conspicuous bundle of newspapers under his arm.’ These were the papers of the day, full of praise for his play The Quare Fellow, then a Stratford East triumph that was packing them in. Behan was now boastful and famous, Cronin realised. Some accounts suggest that a sizable part of The Quare Fellow was actually written by Behan in the French, though Behan was serious about the business of writing (the image of him sitting at a typewriter in McDaid’s was very much tongue-in-cheek) and it strikes me as perhaps unlikely. Besides, he was too social.

A magnificent portrait of Gaston comes from Belfast-born painter Dameon Priestly, now a Soho fixture himself. He’s a reminder too that the pub still attracts people from the art world, on both sides of the counter. There is surely no other pub where one annual art show comes entirely from the output of the staff themselves?

Is The French House as good as it used to be? Is anywhere? I wasn’t there in the perceived glory days and can’t comment, but the pub as it stands now is quite perfect to me, even if Soho has lost some of its charm and uniqueness, not to mention its seediness and carefully curated shabiness. People will always say a pub was better before than it is now, but Gaston himself insisted at his retirement that there is a continuity in things. I think these words could apply to many pubs everywhere:

The crowd we have now is just a carbon copy of the same crowd that was coming in 40 or 50 years ago when I was a boy. They are the same type of people…They themselves create an atmosphere. It’s no use putting up a couple of plastic onions and saying you’re creating a French atmosphere, it doesn’t work like that. Atmosphere is a human thing, concerning hearts and souls.

I’ll drink to that, Monsieur.

Famously, James Joyce insisted that if Dublin ‘one day suddenly disappeared from the Earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.’

Plenty of the Dublin of the big blue book has disappeared of course, and some of it is at risk of vanishing. Take Barney Kiernan’s pub on Little Britain Street (setting of the Cyclops episode, where Bloom is confronted by The Citizen) which is a slowly decaying shopfront just doors away from the fashionable and award-winning 1661 cocktail bar. When the celebrated photographer Lee Miller walked into Barney Kiernan’s in the 1940s, it struck her that ‘everything in the place is a souvenir of some kind or other.’

In the company of my friend, the playwright Jimmy Murphy (he of Kings of the Kilburn High fame, which itself plays out in a pub), I went on a Friday afternoon ramble around some public houses that gain mention in Ulysses and are still open for business. I share the sentiment of the excellent Dublin By Pub, who wrote a spirited defence of Bloomsday, a day which is much more than Duke Street, where ‘they quaff overpriced burgundy for to dull the sharp sting of the similarly overpriced gorgonzola.’ It’s much more fun to try and find what else remains of the book.

Like Davy Byrne’s, Mullett’s on Amiens Street is not alone still trading, but is also doing business under the same name. Unbeknownst to me, there is even a historic sign for it on the other side of the premises, on what is now Foley Street. It’s a peculiar enough sight, a concreted pubfront with just the name of John Mullett surviving.

So RIP John Mullett’s of Nighttown and Foley Street, but walking around the corner, you can still enter the pub on Amiens Street.

At 2pm on a Friday, the pub is home to just a few regulars, and Racing TV is doing its job in the corner. Mullett’s is clearly a regulars bar, and anyone new will stand out a little, but that shouldn’t be mistaken for saying it’s a cold house. The barman delivered the (excellent) pints to the table.

The walls leave you in no doubt it is a Republican shop. Long Kesh prison craft is there, but so is Portlaoise. There’s a poster for a commemoration in Bodenstown for Theobald Wolfe Tone, one of the ‘many Irish heroes and heroines of antiquity’ mentioned in Ulysses. Most of the dead here are more recent.

In Ulysses, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus are on their way out of Nighttown (Bloom has lost a button from his trousers along the way) when they pass two pubs here:

So, bevelling around by Mullett’s and the Signal House which they shortly reached, they proceeded perforce in the direction of Amiens street railway terminus, Mr Bloom being handicapped by the circumstance that one of the back buttons of his trousers had, to vary the timehonoured adage, gone the way of all buttons though, entering thoroughly into the spirit of the thing, he heroically made light of the mischance.

The Signal House is also still trading, though now under the name of J & M Cleary’s. Jim Cleary was a publican, distinguished hurler and close comrade of Harry Boland and Michael Collins.

There are few pub interiors in the city as fine as Cleary’s. Even its distinctive exterior - painted by Colm O’Connor - is immediately recognisable, the pub and the railway bridge meeting. Danny Gleeson, who worked the bar there in the 1930s, remembered to Kevin C. Kearns that it was a pub which drew:

….a fair share of dockers, railway workers, people from the tenements, working-class people, some post office workers, and we also had a good clientele out of the custom's office right across the road. But we had some very solid, hard-working fellas off the quays and off the railway.... The railway men and dockers drank mostly porter, as opposed to stout. Porter was the main drink. In the thirties when a man came into a public house and asked for a pint you gave him a pint of porter.

Cleary’s is doing well these days, programming cultural events in its gigantic back bar, but the main bar is the draw for most and if you haven’t stepped inside of it it’s more than worth the trek to Amiens Street.

Jumping the tram, we made for The Malt House on James’s Street. In the book, tea merchant Tom Kernan makes his way along the street, passing Crimmins’ Wine and Spirit Merchants at numbers 27 and 28 James’s Street.

How do you do, Mr Crimmins? First rate, sir. I was afraid you might be up in your other establishment in Pimlico. How are things going? Just keeping alive. Lovely weather we’re having. Yes, indeed. Good for the country. Those farmers are always grumbling. I’ll just take a thimbleful of your best gin, Mr Crimmins. A small gin, sir. Yes, sir.

There’s a very good chance you’ve gone by The Malt House as the Luas trundles along the awkward stretch before the hospital. If you’re eagle-eyed and you watch domestic football, you’ve perhaps seen a pitchside advertisement for the pub in nearby Richmond Park.

Dublin 8 is a rapidly changing postcode, and I am a little sentimental for a time when St. Pat’s had a greater presence within it, embodied for me by the sadly lost institution that was The Clock on Thomas Street. From The Harold House (where Charlie Walker, the man who signed Paul McGrath, was a regular) down to Kavanagh’s on New Street and right through the postcode, there was a trail of pubs that were loosely ‘Pats pubs’, i.e places where supporters gathered in good numbers on match nights. The Malt House is amongst the last of them outside of the Inchicore heartland. It’s a friendly shop, and while it could be described like Mullett’s as a pub with a core regular base, its presence beside the Guinness Storehouse and a hospital means it gets a broader mix of passing trade.

Of the three pubs, only Cleary’s alludes to Ulysses, hosting events around Joyce (including an excellent Bloomsday celebration this Tuesday) and playfully evoking the name The Signal House on occasion. All three are pubs that a visitor could pass through with no sense of their mention in what was arguably the most signficiant English-language work of the twentieth century. I think Joyce would like it that way, as the city continues in its own time, rather than being frozen in his.

I find her work immediately recognisable and striking, a biography noting that ‘she sees Dublin as a feminine city and Dublin is indeed the heroine of her paintings.’ She also painted many views of rural Ireland. She died in 2016.

If she was guilty of anything, like Markey Robinson in earlier times, it was perhaps producing too much work, meaning that her work now changes hands relatively cheaply on the secondary market. The best of her work can be seen in the Duke Street Gallery, which represented her over many years. Favouring acrylic on card, the work there shows a great diversity of themes and locations.

Pubs and bars were a recurring theme in her work, and here are some of my favourites. I very much regret not trying to reach out to her estate and include one in The Dublin Pub, where a chapter explored the more familiar work of Harry Kernoff.

Gartlan’s pub is in Kingscourt, Co. Cavan. Built c.1780, the pub has a distinctive thatched roof, and is well and truly traditional in its interior and no-nonsense approach. Like all the best pubs, there is no television in the main bar. Mulligan’s on Poolbeg Street is unlikely to need an introduction here and is a classic of the genre. Finally, The Shelbourne bar is a venue Carroll went back to again and again in her work. These paintings don’t show the tiny Horseshoe Bar, but the larger space.

In Mulligan’s pub on Poolbeg Street, an old sign above the bar notes the presence of trade union labour on the premises. In different times, membership of a trade union was vital for a bar worker keen to get behind the counter in many such institutions. It wasn’t a question of the publican insisting on it, but your fellow workers tolerating your presence behind the bar.

Any older bar worker will tell you that Banba Hall on Parnell Square was the Bar Workers ‘ Union. To give the union its proper title, the Irish National Union of Vintners, Grocers and Allied Trades Assistants was one of the most significant in the city, tracing its origins to 1863. In the Victorian city, the line between public house and grocer was often blurred, as still visible in the architecture of pubs like Keogh’s on South Anne Street.

In the years of the revolution, Banba Hall was often utilised for clandestine purposes. The President of the Union, Patrick Moran, was hanged in Mountjoy Gaol in March 1921 for his IRA activities. Throughout the years of the revolution, the union participated in all General Strikes, and the industry itself was prone to industrial action into subsequent decades. Beyond striking, the union represented the voices of bar workers on a range of issues, including safety in work. In 1973, young Wexford-born barman James Booth died after being assaulted in a Dublin pub, something which led the union onto the streets. 1,500 barmen took to the streets on that occasion, representing workers in some 700 pubs.

Not all industrial action was popular. For strike action to be effective, it generally has to be disruptive. Barmen seized on the 1994 World Cup, against the backdrop of Jack Charlton bringing us to the tournament for only the second time ever. A three-day strike impacted on the competition early on, but was quickly wound-down. Most supported the workers, but not A REGULAR in the Evening Herald, who struck a note Margaret Thatcher would be proud of.

Many a regular has gone to his local boozer for a quiet drink, only to have to listen to some opinionated barman who thinks everybody in the pub wants to listen to him. It is always the regular who is the person to pay. The regular holiday-maker goes to the airport only to find traffic control on strike.

A truly ridiculous dispute involving the union ran for almost fifteen years, concerning Downey’s pub in Dun Laoghaire. In fact, it is included in the Guinness Book of World Records, who tell us:

Initiated by the Irish National Union of Vintners, Grocers and Allied Trades Assistants, on 3 March 1939, the staff of Downey's pub in Dún Laoghaire, Dublin, Ireland, went on strike in response to the dismissal of a unionized employee who was replaced with a non-unionized worker. A picket outside the pub, including a placard that read "Strike on at Downey's", would remain in place until 27 November 1953 - a duration of 14 years 269 days, making this one of the longest labour strikes of any kind on record.

In the pages of The Bell magazine, an interview with a representative of the workers gave their position, and reminds us that this was quite a gendered occupation.

This Union objects to female workers behind counters in the Dublin area and to an apprentice in a house where there is not a senior assistant. At the Dun Laoghaire pub, we chose to ignore a year’s long breach of our general objection to barmaids… That lady was succeeded by an employed girl, and still we did not object. But we had to object when the senior male assistant was let go and the girl was kept on.

The strike at Downey’s, which became known as the ‘everlasting strike’, made its way into TIME magazine and beyond. Only the death of publican James Downey - who came to view the strikers as something of a novelty and tourist attraction outside his premises - brought the dispute to an end.

Today, bar work is quite precarious, and lifetimers are few and far between. I think about the plaque at the end of the bar in Grogan’s to Sean Kearney, who gave more than five decades of service to one institution, and wonder if those kind of days are now over forever.

Sitting on John’s Quay in the heart of Kilkenny city, the Home Rule Club is a very rare surviving example of a kind of social space that was once commonplace in the nineteenth century. Today, it is essentially a pub. Associated with the Irish National Federation, the anti-Parnell wing of the Home Rule movement, the club was one of many across the island that offered a place of social recreation to members and supporters.

The Parnell split, which emerged from the scandal of Charles Stewart Parnell’s affair with Katharine O’Shea, devastated the Home Rule movement. As the party questioned its own path ahead, and who should lead it, a hostile M.P quipped to Parnell ‘who is to be the mistress of the party?’ Though ‘Kitty O'Shea’ was a name bestowed on her by Parnell’s enemies (‘Kitty’ being a slang term in Victorian society for a prostitute), it is the name that would later enter popular memory, and a public house in Dublin would affectionately carry the name:

There were plenty of publicans on both sides of the Parnell split, but the creation of new Home Rule Clubs by the Irish National Federation was a political masterclass, borrowing in no small part from the culture of British political parties, where Conservative Clubs and Workingmen’s Clubs were both significant players in the organisation of parties there. The culture of British political parties was often the envy of Irish politicians, with the Labour movement developing things like the Clarion Cycle Club and Workingmen’s Libraries.

These were social outlets, yes, but they were also spaces for political organisation. In Kilkenny, the Home Rule Club first opened on Lower Patrick Street. We know from its archive that the Kilkenny Home Rule Club’s activities included ‘rowing on the Nore (the Club had its own slipway on John’s Quay), a cricket team, a brass band, a dramatic society and a library were available for members.’

On the walls of the Home Rule Club you’ll find John Redmond, the Home Rule leader who perhaps came closest to the dream of Irish self-government, but whose legacy was forever tarnished by his enthusiastic recruitment for the First World War. Parnell appears too - surely to the shock and horror of the original founders - though in the form of Clark Gable, who played the role of the great leader in a widely-panned adaptation of his life. For the most part though, it is the Anti-Parnellite wing of the Home Rule movement who take up the wall space.

Serving a great (and good value) pint of Kilkenny, and with pool tables always busy, the Home Rule Club perhaps has the feeling of a private members club, but it is open to the public and well worth a visit. Upstairs, the fine social room is used by Kilkenomics and other festivals in the very busy local calendar.

On the other side of the Parnell split, I’ve always enjoyed the drinking song of W.B Yeats, Come Gather Round Me Parnellites, written in the 1930s but which may as well have been written in the immediate aftermath of his death. Parnell was so stranger to public houses, The Bailey on Dublin’s Duke Street being a personal favourite.

COME gather round me Parnellites,
And praise our chosen man;
Stand upright on your legs awhile,
Stand upright while you can,
For soon we lie where he is laid,
And he is underground;
Come fill up all those glasses
And pass the bottle round.

Gainor Crist was - in part - the influence for the hard-drinking character of Sebastian Dangerfield in J.P Donleavy’s The Ginger Man. Like Donleavy, he was a veteran of the U.S Armed Forces who availed of the G.I Bill, which allowed U.S students to study abroad after the war.

In J.P Donleavy’s Ireland, he included an image of Crist at the side gate of Trinity College Dublin, clutching an electric fire he was on the way to the pawnshop to trade in:

This saintly expedient gentleman on this day had resolutely made the decision that money for a few pints and a ball of malt in the pub would keep him as comfortably warm as any electric fire. And as he said, the steam from his piss could prove it.

Brendan Behan predicted that Donleavy’s book would ‘go around the world and beat the bejaysus out of the Bible’, and whatever of that, it has remained in print since publication and sold millions of copies, earning it the status of a cult classic.

Public houses are an important part of the world of The Ginger Man, but as Dublin By Pub noted, its difficult often to identify the actual drinking dens. Still, its descriptions of snugs, counters, pints and the world of the public house is up there with the best for descriptive qualities. Donleavy would argue elsewhere that ‘except that they left every customer pissing in debt, most Dublin pubs if they resembled anything at all, resembled banks. Stout mahogany doors, frosted glass windows etched with legends, ‘Whiskey Bonders, Sherry Importers.’’

In Dublin, Donleavy insisted, ‘one can walk in any direction and not have to proceed more than thirty paces to the privacy of a public house, thereby proving the existance of greatest convenience to your thirsty pedestrian the world has ever known.’

At The Bailey, a memorial plaque to publican and author John Ryan includes the words of Donleavy, who described him as ‘one of Dublin’s Princes.’ But Crist himself was long recalled in Grogan’s pub by a small memorial plaque crafted by the artist Desmond MacNamara, today on display in a Dublin museum. MacNamara was himself a part of the great bohemian moment in Dublin, his studio on Grafton Street playing no small role in making McDaid’s the so-called 'literary pub’ of earlier times.

Crist’s entry in the Dictionary of Irish Biography is really worth reading, containing what is surely one of the best endings in the series:

Crist died on 5 July 1964 at Santa Cruz de Tenerife, where he is buried. After seeing a man resembling Crist in Dublin in the early 1990s, Donleavy occasionally voiced suspicions that Crist might have faked his own death in order to evade financial and matrimonial difficulties (one of his favourite songs had been ‘Don't bury me in Santa Cruz’). This is generally considered unlikely, however, as he is known to have suffered severely from pneumonia and delirium tremens in his later years.

With this Thursday marking the centenary of the birth of Donleavy, a few of us have decided to mark the occasion by returning Crist to the wall of Grogan’s. Carefully removing the picture of Crist on his way to the pawn shop from Donleavy’s later book, I brought it to the old reliable Gallery 23 on Sundrive Road who did a fantastic job. It was the least we could do for The Ginger Man. It will hopefully be there long after I am gone, to Santa Cruz or wherever else.

People are passionate about the historic great third space of Irish life, and deeply concerned for it. Since 2005, more than two thousand public houses have closed across the Republic alone. In real terms, this means a drop from 8,617 to 6,498. ‘In the absence of Government intervention’, notes economist Anthony Foley, ‘we are likely to see a further 600-1,000 pubs close over the coming decade.’ In recent years, there have been calls for the Irish public house to be recognised as part of Ireland’s cultural heritage, through inclusion in UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list. Such calls come primarily from a place of worry.

I’m not sure what economic advice Adam Smith would offer to your local struggling public house, but perhaps Marx would suggest collective ownership. The Marx that emerged in Francis Wheen’s celebrated biography enjoyed a pint, and was even ‘co-president of Trier Tavern Club, a society of about thirty university students from his home town whose main ambition was to get drunk as frequently and riotously as possible.’ Several of Marx’s London and Manchester pubs of choice have lost the battle to progress, but in Britain the emergence of co-operative run public houses has reversed some of the decline there, not least in rural areas.

Co‑operative pubs, described as pubs ‘which are owned and controlled predominantly by members of the local community’, have enjoyed considerable success since The Old Crown in Hesket Newmarket became England’s first registered co-operatively owned pub in 2003. As of April this year, the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) note that no fewer than ‘217 pubs are community-owned with another 28 community-run’ across Britain. Remarkably, not a single community-owned pub has faltered, even in the face of the pandemic and other challenges. In Britain, registering pubs with local councils as an ACV (Assets of Community Value) has ensured that if a premises is put up for sale, a community interest group will have the option of first refusal on its purchase. In Scotland, the Community Right to Buy scheme functions in much the same way, though there is no equivalent in Wales or the North here.

One more curious aspect of the rise of the co-operative pub in Britain that recalls rural Ireland is the manner in which many of these operations have come to play different roles in their communities, with a report noting ‘communities are turning pubs into what their community needs… addressing a wide range of issues important to their communities.’ Shops, allotments and a variety of other facilities have emerged, recalling the manner in which Irish pubs historically doubled up as grocers and more besides. A walk into a pub like Kehoe’s on Dublin’s South Anne Street still reveals the architectural legacy of the days of the old spirit grocer, from the lower counter to the presence of old drawers behind the bar that once housed tea and groceries.

For readers who think this may fly in Red Salford or on the Clydeside but offends Irish sensibilities, the residents of Kilteely in Limerick may disagree. In the county which has witnessed the most dramatic decline in the number of licensed public houses over the last twenty years, the last pub in the town was collectively purchased and renamed The Street Bar. A sign welcomes visitors to the premises, describing ‘a community working together in Kilteely.’ The pub was not the first of its kind, and an even more recent example can be found in Kerry’s Dromid. In the local Kerryman newspaper, the group behind the local collective purchase of that pub described its importance in terms that went beyond economics: ‘The retention of this asset was essential to this rural area not least because of its social remit where all gather and it has many historical happy memories and hopefully we will play the same role going forward.’ In both cases, those who invested in saving these local institutions were made aware that profit was not a guarantee, and that this collective endeavour was a gamble of sorts driven by a desire to preserve an important local amenity.

We may not know what Adam Smith would make of it all, though a blog post from the Adam Smith Institute attributes the decline of the British pub to ‘not just the killjoy lobby, [but] increased costs of National Insurance and minimum wage increases.’ On the other side of the political aisle, the teetotaller James Larkin saw little good in the pub. Publicans, Larkin’s newspaper The Irish Worker insisted, ‘run this city, govern this city....everything is made subservient to the interest of the drink seller.’ If the people themselves become the drink seller, and the space becomes about much more than the selling of drink, could even Larkin oppose that?

That Patrick was clutching a pint was in itself interesting to me.

For temperance campaigners and Irish nationalists alike, seeking the closure of pubs on St. Patrick’s Day was a sustained campaign in the early twentieth century. As Bradley Kadel writes in his excellent cultural history of drink in the Ireland of the Gaelic Revival:

Irish nationalists deplored the displays of drunkenness on St Patrick’s Day. That public houses were open and, more disturbingly, thay they were full, diminished the ‘purity’ of the holiday, nationalists held.

The row between publicans and the Gaelic League can be followed in the pages of An Claidheamh Soluis, the newspaper of the league. The paper would occasionally name and shame publicans across the country who opened their doors on the day. The belief, readers were told in March 1909, ‘that to be truly Gaelic involves drunkenness has been well nigh rooted out of the land, and the man who now tries to make his nationality an excuse for inebriety is looked upon either as a fool or a knave.’

James O’Mara, the Home Rule MP representing South Kilkenny, had brought the Bank Holiday (Ireland) Act 1903 before the House of Commons which created the national holiday. For a party that had plenty of publicans in its ranks, there were different opinions in the Irish Parliamentary Party on the question of whether pubs should trade on the day.

Some of the coverage of pubs opening on the day in the Gaelic League paper is comical. Take this from 1903:

Some of the publicans who shut their front doors and put up their shutters, kept their back doors open. They felt, however, that they were doing a guilty and forbidden thing, and one might from time to time catch them furtively glancing down the street to see whether a Gaelic Leaguer were prowling about.

Three years later, the Gaelic League paper struck a more defeatist note, when ‘the great bulk of the publicans kept their houses open. The result was seen in the police courts on Monday morning, when there were 82 cases of drunkenness as against 12 in the corresponding period last year.’ By opening their doors, the paper felt publicans ‘have forfeited all claim to be regarded henceforward as respectable members of society.’

In the end, O’Mara - the same MP who had won St. Patrick’s Day for the Irish - would introduce another bill which closed public houses on the day. This was a major coup for the Gaelic Leaguers and others. Unsurprisingly, the Licensed Grocers and Vintners Protection Association (LGVPA) stood its ground until the bitter end. As Kadel notes:

The LGVPA’s defence of St. Patrick’s Day trading replied upon many of their usual contentions regarding restricting pub hours. Publicans contended that forcing such closures was akin to treating the Irish working class as children incapable of controlling their more base instincts even when inside orderly and respectable public houses. Under the supervision of a respectable publican, the LGVPA held, drunkenness could be kept in check.

Amen to that.

As the country made its way towards a Civil War in March 1922, the subject of pubs and St. Patrick’s Day was debated by Dáil Éireann, with a new Irish state on the horizon. The motion moved was that ‘the Dáil decrees the feast of St. Patrick to be a public holiday and that all business houses and public houses be closed on that day.’ Countess Markievicz quickly interjected ‘and hotel bars. I do not see why the rich people should not be kept off their drink as well as the poor.’ Arthur Griffith however recalled the days of the Gaelic League campaign against the pubs, and insisted:

If you let out people for a holiday, they ought not to be debarred from getting refreshments. It was tried in the Gaelic League and the result was a popular revulsion against the Gaelic League. You will make it a most unpopular thing if you do that.

On the figure of Patrick removed from The Temple Bar, it was the work of artist Marc Kelly, who noted in an interview with thejournal.ie that it was 14-foot in height, and that ‘a large metal frame was used to provide the structure for the installation and sculpted fibreglass was used to finish it. The team hand-painted the statue, which features shades of green and gold.’ It’s the kind of thing that would probably be a loved piece of kitsch if in the city for a few decades, but whatever about the pint in the hand of the patron saint, the location may have played more of a role in turning the locals against it.

How The American Bar in Belfast’s Sailortown came to get its name is unclear. Like Jordan’s American Bar (which sits quayside in Waterford) it is likely all in the location. Once beside a busy docklands, the area may no longer be defined by the presence of riveters, carters and dockers, but it remains a part of the city with a solid local identity.

A nearby mural honours Winifred Carney (Secretary to James Connolly and present in the GPO), Billy McMullen (a Presbyterian worker in the docks who dedicated his life to the cause of socialism) and others. The message is clear: Class mattered more than creed in these particular streets.

Gone in recent weeks is The Dockers Club on neighbouring Pilot Street, which first opened its doors in the 1970s as a social place for local dockworkers and their families. Having the feeling of a Workingmen’s Club, it was a cheap pint in a setting full of local stories, and also a venue for that other great Belfast tradition: Boxing.

The American Bar pulls no punches, and you are instantly aware of its politics on entering. A banner from the Belfast branch of the National Union of Dock Labourers (once the union of Jim Larkin) takes pride of place. The American Bar has a keen sense of history, with the sign for the much-lamented nearby Rotterdam Bar also upon the walls. In the absence of hard-drinking dockworkers, the pub is now doing perhaps the greatest pub grub on the island, with The Grateful Bread operating a small kitchen. Calamari,Birra Tacos and Ham Croquettas make a mockery of the humble toasty I’m more accustomed to.

What brought me to The American Bar though was a small shrine of sorts to the great Jimmy Hasty, a local legend of Sailortown. Murdered nearby in 1974 while walking to work, Hasty’s death seemed particularly cruel even against the backdrop of the Troubles, as he had overcome so much in life. Having lost an arm in an industrial accident as a teenager, he went on to become a star player for Newry and Dundalk, where he remains a club legend. ‘Born in Sailortown in 1936, Jimmy was destined for a life labouring on the docks’ begins a memorial plaque explaining his story, while a framed picture is fittingly topped by a Dundalk scarf.

I first encountered him in the pages of Peter Sheridan’s marvellous Forty Four: A Dublin Memoir.

Drumcondra were playing Dundalk....Da’s team versus Ma’s team Semi-final of the Leinster Senior Cup. Drums versus The Town. I didn’t care who won. I loved soccer....The only thing of any consequence was the Dundalk no.9, Jimmy Hasty. He had only one arm. Despite his one arm, he had great balance. He looked sharp. The home supporters were very sympathetic. Every time he touched the ball they applauded. In the space of three minutes before half-time he scored twice.

Nicknamed ‘the One-Armed Wonder’, Hasty scored an impressive 18 goals in 22 appearances during his first year at Dundalk. He would impress on the European stage too, scoring twice away to FC Zürich at a time when such heroics were rare from Irish sides. A press report described him as ‘one of the neatest passers of the ball I have ever seen. He controls the ball like a tennis ball and his passes are always low, at carpet level and always accurate.'

Back in his native Sailortown after his footballing career in Louth with Dundalk and Drogheda, he continued to play locally. The gunning down of Hasty in 1974 was a dark day for the people of Sailortown and the Irish footballing community. The walls and roof of The American Bar are given over to football scarves from all across the world, with all represented from Dublin’s Shamrock Rovers to Edinburgh’s Hibernian, via national team scarves from Asia and South America. Still, it is the Dundalk scarf above Hasty that means most.

I’d visited The American Bar after a trip to Solitude for the North Belfast Derby. It’s nice to see from Cliftonville’s website that The American Bar supports the club, with a pitchside advertising hoarding. Like one of my own locals, The Glen of Aherlow (proud shirt sponsors of the St Patrick’s Athletic goalkeeper), it’s always good to see pubs that understand football to be more than the game on the box in the corner of the pub.

A good hotel bar is hard to find. In The Dublin Pub, I gave an entire chapter over to Sam Stephenson’s Horseshoe Bar in the Shelbourne Hotel, but there are few others that command or commanded the same respect. In former times, the Dolphin Hotel on Essex Street boasted a beautiful bar, described by one guide as an ‘American-style cocktail bar.’ John Ryan, author of the brilliant Dublin memoir Remembering How We Stood, recalled of The Dolphin that it was ‘a lovely old bar and accommodated everybody, it seemed to catch the spirit of the times better than any other place I knew in the late forties. There’d be intellectuals and writers at The Dolphin.’

At the Central Hotel, The Library Bar was something of a quiet oasis. For me, it recalls a few names, not least the poet Seamus Heaney, journalist George ‘Ringo’ Byrne and the novelist Edna O’Brien, all of whom I remember seeing there on more than one occasion. It was a visual feast: red curtains, green walls, comfy and weathered seats, rugs that are fashionable now but not then, old books in abundance. Peculiarly for a hotel bar, the majority of customers always seemed to be inhabitants of the city, rather than hotel guests, who were perhaps generally seeking a more traditional pub experience.

Opening in 1887 - and significantly expanded in 1891 - The Central Hotel to me can only be understood in the context of its Victorian red-brick surroundings, and as a companion to the neighbouring South City Markets building. Just as the building Dubliners popularly call the George’s Street Arcade has a deceptively large footprint, with retail units on ground level we may think of as separate to the arcade structure, The Central Hotel was also unusual in featuring retail units on its ground level. In the late nineteenth-century, the commercial life of the city was shifting rapidly, with the emergence of a stronger middle class.

For a period during the War of Independence, Vincent Byrne of ‘The Squad’ (the hit-team assembled by Michael Collins) recalled that ‘the Central Hotel in Exchequer St. was occupied by British military.’ On one occasion, the hotel register was demanded by the IRA, as twelve Volunteers waited outside. As Derek Molyneux and Darren Kelly recount it in their history of the war, ‘some Volunteers standing by suggested shooting the registrar on the spot, as well as everyone else in the hotel - it was known to be a regular military haunt.’ When the British army left the premises, the Hotel happily advertised their departure in the press.

The Central Hotel was the kind of place that felt like it was there forever, and had always thrived. In truth, there was plenty of turbulence in its economic journey. Empty for more than a decade, a 1990 report in the Evening Press noted that its sale for £850,000 was ‘considered one of the bargain buys of the year by property experts.’ Readers were told:

The hotel and its elegant drawing room enjoyed their heyday in the 1940s, when it became a magnet for Dublin socialites. Its art deco style cocktail bar was packed out continually…. Facing a decline in the number of visitors to Dublin and tough competition from new hotels, it fell into decline in the 1950s and 1960s.

Most hits for the Library Bar in the newspaper archives of more recent times reflect the fact it was a popular interview location for journalists. Shane MacGowan, who others have recalled seeing there on occasion to me, was interviewed by Peter Murphy Hot Press in The Library Bar in 2004:

We’re sitting in the Library bar of the Central Hotel in Dublin on a Friday afternoon in mid-July. Dressed in a stripy shirt, suit jacket and trousers, face fuzzed in soft beard, pale blue eyes clear and bright, Shane’s looking a lot better than the last time I interviewed him, which was in late ’97. Back then he was in a bad way, nodding off into his drink every few minutes and speaking like a man who’d suffered a stroke. Today he might not exactly pass for one of those bland and aerobicised mediocrity-mongers currently masquerading as pop stars, but he’s wakeful enough for a man who was up at three this morning catching a ferry to Dublin and doing radio slots five hours later.

In 2012, at the height of Hipsterdom, a glorious review from Jonathan De Burca Butler in the Evening Herald described the bar as the place to be:

The Central Hotel suits the hipster’s sensibilities. Its location, up the stairs from the foyer of an old hotel, is quirky and hidden enough to rank as a bit of a find and, as the name suggests, the walls are surrounded in display cabinets of books - something that appeals to the hipster’s self-image as an intellectual.

Under the stewardship of The Hoxton, The Library Bar is back open for business, albeit a little smaller (gone is the side room) and a little too polished. On a street not short of second hand books in charity shops or the neighbouring arcade, it would surely have been more aesthetically pleasing to fill the shelves with books acquired locally than identikit, repeated titles that look more like props than books. The pint remains stellar and the location too.

Still, the greatest challenge to the fortunes of The Libary Bar remains The Hoxton’s ill-advised pursuit of a High Court injunction against the neighbouring Yamamori Izakaya, an important part of the fabric of the late-night city. This is well-explored on a recent edition of the Nialler9 podcast. As Yamamori have pointed out, in previous times The Central Hotel and it co-existed happily, with the area above their premises not used for accommodation:

The previous operators of the Central Hotel deployed the area over our premises as a function room. The current owners chose to convert this area into bedrooms despite our concerns which were known to them.

As welcome as the return of The Library Bar is, it is spaces like Yamamori Izakaya that are currently most at risk in the city. Dublin can’t afford to lose it, or spaces like it, in a night-time economy that already feels hollowed out.

In their classic book The Irish Pub, Turtle Bunbury and James Fennell noted one publican describing the television set in his bar as ‘the devil in the corner.’

Everyone will have their own idea of what contributes to a good public house environment. For me, I am a great admirer of pubs that either don’t have television sets, or pubs which know how to use them sparingly. M. O’Brien’s of Sussex Terrace and The Palace Bar come to mind. While big sporting occasions have their place, don’t expect the 3.15 from Southwell.

There was a time - before many people could afford one at home - that the novelty of a television set was something a pub actively promoted. Take this ad from Joe Grogan’s establishment on South William Street, which still carries his name long after his proprietorship. It’s a considerable irony of course that the absence of a television is one of Grogan’s selling points in 2026.

With Teilifís Éireann broadcasting only from 1961, there was a period when the offering in Irish pubs was the BBC. Each night, the channel concluded broadcasting with God Save The Queen. The Hungry Brigade website (a brilliant online memoir with plenty of humour from Republican veterans of the period) recalls how:

It was customary, therefore, to switch off the television as soon as programming finished. Failure to do so could cause trouble as it was also consuetudinary for Republicans or politically conscious gurriers to toss a glass or a stool through the television screen if it continued to beam out triumphalist imperialist propaganda across Irish airwaves.

On an exceptionally rare occasion, a television set has darkened the door of Grogan’s. The late Tommy Smith recalled:

There was one exception, when a film of the people who fought in the Spanish Civil War featured a regular called Bob Doyle, a republican who drank here. On that occasion we brought in a telly, but it didn't work. It was a good omen.

For some publicans, finding the balance was key, and some segregated pubs into distinct areas for that purpose. In a December 1978 edition of the Kilkenny People, a journalist lamented how ‘nowadays, television is the centre of attraction in far too many pubs, but at O’Dwyer’s (Patrick Street) the television is never blaring... There is a beautifully compact television lounge off the main bars. Here, customers can watch a film or a game without being interrupted or indeed without interrupting anybody.’

The novelty of The Globe on South Great George's Street not having a television set during the 1994 World Cup was enough for a journalist to visit, and for the frontpage of a supplement in the paper:

According to manager Jay Bourke, the Herald reported, ‘The Globe has never been a place for putting things in people’s faces - this includes large things like screens showing hundreds of sweaty men in all their technicolour brilliance running around after a mucky ball.’ For many others, the defining memories of Italia 90 and USA 94 was the communal experience of watching it all together in a pub. Con Houlihan captured that in his famed quip of missing Italia 90, because he was in Italy at the time. This footage from USA 94 gives some sense of how well publicans did out of it all, one fan telling the camera ‘tá muid ag winning an World Cup.’

Now, we all carry a television of sorts in our pockets. While The Globe is reopened with very big television sets nonetheless, a sea of mobile phones will surely appear in Grogan’s should we make it. We live in hope.

Emmett Grogan’s 1972 memoir Ringolevio: A Life Played for Keeps is a classic of its genre. It is one of the great literary legacies of the counter-cultural moment of the 1960s, though it is almost completely unknown in Ireland, a country that features prominently within it.

A founding father of the San Francisco Diggers, Abbie Hoffman (who Grogan distrusted deeply) recalled how Grogan’s movement ‘combined Dada street theater with the revolutionary politics of free. Slum-alley saints, they lit up the period by spreading the poetry of love and anarchy with broad strokes of artistic genius.’ If the Summer of Love had an architect, it was Grogan. Later, Bob Dylan would dedicate his album Street Legal to the memory of Grogan, who died at just 35 .

While his memoir has primarily attracted those interested in understanding the Diggers, it includes a remarkable account of an extended visit to Dublin in the 1960s. For many years I believed it to be the stuff of fantasy, but the New York Public Library holds papers from Emmett that include several manuscripts from his time lodging in the Brazen Head.

The early parts of Grogan’s memoir detail his New York childhood and his 1960s travels across cities like Rotterdam, Paris and Rome in the years before San Francisco’s 1967. In the text, he uses the alias Kenny Wisdom when discussing his travels to Europe. Arriving in Dublin, he describes taking up lodgings in the Abbotsford Hotel on Harcourt Street, before making his way through the city streets towards Neary’s. Not feeling too well, he wandered into the pub:

He thought that some soup might help. He dressed warmly and walked down Harcourt Street past Saint Stephen’s Green to Grafton and went into Neary’s pub on the corner of Chatham Street. It was packed crowded with neatly dressed, middle-class people talking about the theatre, and it was stuffy and hot. The lights were globes with brass fixings, the walls were mahogany and mirror, and the bar was made of pink marble. Pink marble! Kenny didn’t really want to stay there because it was too stuffy, he was sweating, and he didn’t like the self-righteous looks on the faces of the two chubby men or the sound of their hollow laughter, but he really needed something in his belly so he squeezed in beside them and told the waiter to get him a bowl of bouillon or something. When asked what he wanted to drink, he pointed to a mug of black beer on the chubby guys’ table. They were talking very loudly now about radio.

Kenny peeled off his coat and scarf and for want of any other place to put them, he dropped them on the floor beneath his table. This caused a few of the patrons who noticed, to adopt an attitude toward Kenny, who couldn’t have cared less. The soup came with a “Here’s your pint a stout, sir.” Kenny thanked the waiter, remembering that, “Yes, that’s what it’s called. Stout.”

Later, and having puked outside of Neary’s, he makes for the nearby McDaid’s. At this point, McDaid’s was still the leading literary public house of the city, with Paddy O’Brien behind the bar. O’Brien would later be snatched by Tommy Smith and Paddy Kennedy to work in Grogan’s on South William Street. McDaid’s made a great impression on Emmett, who had romantic ideas of Dublin from reading The Ginger Man and the work of Behan.

He liked the saloon with its high-ceiling, scattered tables and solid wooden bar. It was a big, funky room and the only decor was the people in it. They were hearty and whether they were laughing or arguing, discussing or pontificating, they were enjoying themselves and each other. They weren’t dressed up to impress anybody. The noise they were making was a racket of music, and within seconds Kenny had picked up on the accented sounds of the flavored phrases of language.

More than anything, he liked the mix of people in McDaid’s, recalling it as a pub where political radicals and republicans could be found. Some of Grogan’s tales of his involvement with republicans while in the city are fanciful - dates don’t quite match up for him to be present at the bombing of Nelson’s Pillar for example.

Grogan later lodged in The Brazen Head, now very much a tourist-focused public house, but then under the patronage of Mrs. Cooney. I chose an image of Cooney behind the bar for the front of The Dublin Pub. That Grogan names Cooney in itself lends credibility to his tale. He tells his readership ‘the Brazen Head is a small, antiquated residential inn built in the early seventeenth century. The pub is a thick-beamed, low-ceilinged room, dimly lit by funky brass-banded lanterns, and its lead-gridded windows face into the courtyard.’

It was a pub where Grogan recalled meeting Republicans, a recollection former regulars of the 1950s and 1960s have shared with me too. As Grogan describes it:

They were shortchanged by de Valera and his pack of cronies, these Sinn Feiners and old IRA boys, and condemned to bitterness, a meager pension, and a glass of booze or two at places like the Brazen Head.

Ringolevio is a brilliant memoir, though Grogan’s friend and fellow Digger Peter Coyote reminds us:

There is no way that I can tell you who Emmett was; neither will this book. It’s like him: part fact, part fiction, a lot of anger and humor, a lot of clear-eyed calls, and some poppycock. Emmett told you what he thought. He was stand-up. he was a man, extreme and contradictory, quarrelsome and kind, charismatic and self-destructive, who willed himself to be a hero….

…So read Ringolevio in that light. Don’t believe everything you read, but don’t be too quick to doubt either. Whether or not he actually did everything he claimed in exactly the way he claimed is immaterial. As Emmett disclaims in his Author’s note, “This book is true.” But that doesn’t mean it all happened. Emmett was a guidon carried into battle, an emblem behind which people rallied their imaginations.

If you want to know more, Grogan is my subject this week on the Three Castles Burning podcast.

Like many Irish readers, I first encountered the Parisian titan that is Harry’s New York Bar in the pages of Behan’s autobiographical Confessions of an Irish Rebel.

Behan was a fundamentally entertaining - if not always entirely reliable - narrator of his time in Paris. The truth of Behan’s time in La Ville Lumière can be found in Deirdre McMahon’s fantastic Documentary on One. Behan insisted to have worked not in Harry’s Bar, as is sometimes misremembered in the telling of the tale, but from Harry’s Bar. Claiming to have been a pimp of sorts, he remembered being paid by a man called Tony to bring customers to a brothel. As his biographer Michael O’Sullivan tells it, ‘the girls worked out of Trois Quartiers and Brendan’s job was to find customers, mostly Americans, in Harry’s Bar. He did quite well for several months until the manager twigged his activities and told him to move on.’

It’s easy to spend your time in Paris walking in the footsteps of Irish writers. There’s Rue de l’Odéon, where Sylvia Beach ran the little bookshop that gave the world Ulysses. Le Falstaff on the Rue de Montparnasse was a haunt of Sam Beckett. Irish visitors there are rarer today - in fact they seemed a little chuffed someone had come specifically because of Beckett - but Harry’s Bar will be on the list of many Irish visitors to the city.

Famous for its cocktails, and even laying claim to the invention of the Bloody Mary and the Sidecar, Harry’s opened its doors in 1911. Visiting it, the bar struck me as a very democratic institution, with a decent sized waiting line out of tourist season and no distinction in regular customer, irregular customer or curious tourist. A comment I had read online was swirling around in my head as we waited our turn, describing it as a ‘tourist trap filled with loud vulgar Americans.’ In the end, it struck me as a brilliantly maintained time capsule, the staff and (mostly local) clientele friendly. Most tourists have one drink and leave, but we made a night of it. Sometimes, you need to lean into the place you’re visiting and just accept that some places are famous for a reason.

It has long held the Irish imagination, perhaps owing more than anything to Behan. To the Evening Herald in the 1960s, it was ‘the most famous bar in the world. In case you have forgotten, it’s the 19th century New York saloon, swing doors and all, which was transported to Paris in 1911 and later run by Scotsman Harry MacElhone.’

One reason the bar is well-known is its curious connection to U.S politics. U.S passport holders are invited to partake in a straw poll before Presidential elections, which have resulted in a surprisingly accurate list of winners. Kirk LeMoyne Billings, who spent the summer of 1937 touring Europe with a young John Fitzgerald Kennedy, mentions Harry’s in his private journal of their time in the city, though the young men ‘found Paris night life none too exciting - the main idea seems to be to buy a glass of champagne at each place.’

Seán Diffley, one of Ireland’s great sports journalists with an encyclopedic knowledge of rugby, remembered Harry’s Bar as once the go-to for Ireland’s rugby team visiting the city. In 1972, that team included Seán Lynch, Dublin publican of The Swan on Aungier Street. Fergus Slattery of the side told Diffley how ‘we always went to Harry’s Bar, just off the Avenue de l’Opera. It was part of our Captain’s era, Tom Kiernan’s, so Harry’s it had to be.’ In 1984, the Irish team safely defeated and a large traveling support enjoying the city, John Feeney reported:

There were other sights - a lawyer lurching along in the middle of Rue St. Lazare and refusing to move when a police car arrived. There was a well-known young doctor crying in Harry’s Bar because he claimed that he should have been on the team. Make no mistake; the Irish team, too, scarcely noticed that they had been trounced.

The days of team and fan alike drinking into the night in Harry’s Bar have long passed.

A big draw for Irish people towards Harry’s in the 60s and 70s was the fact it offered a great pint of Guinness, as the first Parisian bar to offer it on draught. The Irish Press told their readers in 1963 that ‘Guinness had made a good business deal by establishing a liaison with Harry’s New York Bar… it is really the port of entry into the Parisian liquor market.’ On visiting the bar, the reporter met Rose Gartland, a Carlow native who had spent more than fifty years in the city, originally working as a receptionist in the Ritz. She spent two or three nights a week socialising in the bar:

She is an extreme nationalist in her outlook...around midnight she adjourns to the basement to call for an Irish song and join in the chorus...her one ambition now is to return here and die under an Irish sky.

I wonder if she got her wish.

Harry’s Bar are in Dublin this Tuesday, in a collaboration with The Sackville Lounge off O’Connell Street. It should be a little taste of the great offering for anyone who has yet to stumble in the footsteps of Behan in Paris.

Born in Galway in 1926, Mac Amhlaigh was part of the extraordinary wave of outwards migration from the island in the 1950s. Between 1951 and 1961, estimated net emigration from the Republic stood at 409,000 people, leading one historian to note that emigration ‘had returned to levels characteristic of the closing decades of the nineteenth century.’ Many went to the same places their families had gone before them. In the quiet cemetery in rural Roscommon where my grandfather rests, graves list Coventry, Manchester, Leeds and London alongside local parishes.

The pub is central to Mac Amhlaigh’s memoir. Just ten pages in, and straight off the boat in Northampton on the eve of St Patrick’s Day, it is apparant the pub is where a new migrant will meet his own:

The Admiral Rodney was the name of the pub I dropped into and it was full to the doorways with fine Irish boys, all of them knocking back their pints. I made my way in and got a drink for myself, keeping an eye the whole time in case I’d see a man from Connemara. There weren’t any there, however, it seemed that most of the men were from the County Mayo….

…They have the habit here - the Irish as well as everybody else - of moving from pub to pub instead of staying in the one place as we do at home. When the fun was at its highest in the Rodney, the boys started moving off. At first, I thought they were going off home for their dinner but when I asked one of the men he said no, they were going down to the Bull.

Though Mac Amhlaigh’s book predates the so-called ‘Ballad Boom’ at home, the centality of music in the Irish pubs of Britain is present throughout. In London, he recounts the ‘great music at the Bedford - fiddles, concertinas and tin whistles - and there was hardly a jig or a reel that they didn’t play... This town is, in many ways, more Irish than a lot of the towns at home. More Irish is spoken here and much more Irish music is played here.’

There are cultural tensions throughout the book, even amongst the Irish migrants themselves. For Dubliners and others Mac Amhlaigh encounters on sites, the Irish language is a curiousity and sometimes mocked, while the selling of radical newspapers like the left-wing Connolly Association’s Irish Democrat brings politics into play. Irish speakers gravitated towards each other:

We went in to the Jolly Smokers and we had great craic for a while. Most of the Connemara people go there now and you wouldn’t know but that you weren’t back at home. Nearly every one of the men there have hob-nailed boots, corduroy breeches and big ‘donkey’ jackets and most of them speak Irish all the time.

Mac Amhlaigh returns to Ireland over the course of the memoir, giving him a unique perspective on the differences in life between both places. For many men like him, returning home was never a possibility they entertained. I recall meeting a Dublin man in the Oxford Arms in Camden Town some fifteen years ago, who responded to the question ‘do you get home much?’, by telling me his next visit to Dublin would be ‘for Mount Jerome.’

Mac Amhlaigh compared the pubs of Dublin favourably to those of London on one visit back:

…in Dublin, there are Irish of all kinds - rich poor, intelligent and ignorant - but in England, for the most part, there is only kind of Irishman and that is the worker. If you live long enough over there, you begin to think all the Irish are working class - which, of course, is not true.

I bought an Easter Lily on the Bridge and walked slowly up O’Connell Street. I bought a copy of Inniu and of Aiseiri in Eason’s and took them with me to the Tower Bar. I knocked back two pints very pleasantly while I listened to the chat all around me. The atmosphere in the pubs here is marvellous compared with those over the way. There’s a depth and a vigour in the talk you hear…. In Dublin pubs, you know the drink and the conversation were the most important things; but in England, the drink is only an excuse for playing cribbage and darts. May our lovely Irish pubs last forever!

Mac Amhlaigh’s book is one of the great enduring cultural legacies of Irish migration to Britain at that time. There are others; the LP Irish Music in London Pubs was recorded at The King’s Arms and The Bedford Arms in the early 1960s, capturing talents like Joe Heaney and Margaret Barry. A particular highlight is Heaney singing Morrissey and the Russian Sailor. You could hear a pin drop, or more specifically a pint glass. Sometimes during other recordings, pub life can be heard in the background. Many of these pubs have been lost in recent times in London, with a blander faux-Oirish type emerging.

FÓGRA: The Navvies of North London goes out on RTE Radio 1 on January 2nd 2026. I appear in it, as does Jeremy Corbyn MP and others.

The bird is the wren and the day is the wran.

The tradition of wren boys parading on St. Stephen's Day has faded away over large parts of the island. In my history of the Phoenix Park, lampligher Frank Flanagan recalled to me of Christmas how:

We searched for berried holly in the woods beforehand and sold it door to door. Nearer to Christmas we would make the trip to the west end of the park, the Furry Glen, where we would procure a large bush for wren day. We would try to trap a wren – normally, no luck!

There was a time when the wren boys and mummers were a sight even in suburban Dublin. Of the 1950s and 1960s, the day was recalled to me in Ballyfermot as one when parents from the west of Ireland, living in a sprawling suburbia where the streets carried names like Oranmore, Kylemore, Claddagh and Spiddal, introduced their own children to something ancient and rooted in their own childhoods. It brought the country to the city.

In Kerry, childhood memories of the day are vivid, from right across the county. Con Houlihan remembered the day in his native Castle Island:

Pocket money in that era was something you read about in English schoolboy fiction but the Wran gave us small boys a chance to earn a few shillings. Our band consisted of four wild youths who all had a turn for music. We could sing a song a bit and play a bit...In those days just after the Civil War, you had to be very careful what songs you sang because there was great bitterness in our part of Kerry and if you gave offence you got no money. And so we always played it safe with such innocuous songs as The Isle of Capri, Red River Valley and Roll Along Covered Wagon, Roll Along.

The heart of the wran now is undoubtedly Dingle, or Daingean Uí Chúis. I’ve made several visits to Wran’s Day with historian Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc, who is perhaps best known as a historian of Ireland’s revolutionary period, but who also has a deep interest in the traditional calendar in Ireland, attending days like it and St. Brigid’s Day in Killorglin.

Dingle is a town with a seemingly never-ending calendar of events, many bringing visitors in and some considerably more popular than others with locals, but Wran’s Day as it is called locally is one of the most important events of the year, because it is rooted in the locality itself. It also fits into a broader pattern of days when music and ritual have their place there. As Dr Aoife Granville notes in an excellent piece for RTÉ Brainstorm:

Throughout the calendar, there are traditional marches where the town celebrates their commitment to tradition as well as their "Dingleness" and identity (such as 6am on Saint Patrick’s morning, Easter Sunday, Bealtaine and New Year’s Eve). These marches are led by the Dingle Fife and Drum Band and the band are followed around ritualistic routes of the town by locals

Public houses are central to the day, and the lead up to it. With a unique parading presence representing each of The Quay, The Green and Gold, Sráid Eoin and Goat Street groups, each will have public houses which are important places of planning and preparation for the day, where costumes are made and repaired. In O’Flaherty’s Bar on Bridge Street, hooks are visible in pillars which assist in the tradition, as skills in straw are intergenerationally handed down. As importantly, the pubs are a part of the day itself. The banner of a group will appear at the door of a pub, the members will enter, and a tune is struck up with gusto to signal their arrival.

In Joe O’Toole’s memoir of a Dingle childhood, there were far more pubs but the day is much the same:

All the Wrans did at least two rounds of the town. They each had favourite pub stops where they took a sos. It was the leader’s job to make sure that they regrouped after a drink and continued on to the next ‘filling station’. The cry ‘Fall In!’ was the signal to get outside and into band formation. The more stops they made the harder it was to get them restarted.... He lost a few at each stop, and by early afternoon there was drink flowing in every one of Dingle’s fifty-six pubs.

Essentially, the Wran was a celebration to mark the passing of the shortest day of the year, and it was as old as mankind. It was the defeat of winter and the optimism of the coming spring, with its lengthening days and benign weather. Nowhere was this more evident than in the defining and defiant cry of the Sráid Eoin Wran: ‘We never died a winter yet. Up Sráid Eoin!’

The other lesson of the day is that the pubs of Dingle are at their best when the people of Dingle are in them. Wran’s Day is essentially a people celebrating their own customs, community and way of life. In J. Curran’s bar, the artist Liam O’Neill (whose work hangs in the back bar of The Palace on Fleet Street) pointed out to me the meaning of the framed images that abound. Peig Sayers is not honoured here because of the importance of her recollections of island life, but instead because she lived and worked in Curran’s. For her, Dingle was a world removed from own beginnings, with ‘big tall houses on every side, people going hither and yon and I didn’t understand a word they were saying. My two eyes were popping out of my head with fear.’

Moving through the pubs of Dingle, the walls tell great local tales. In O’Flaherty’s, the saga of the naming of the town is recalled in ballads and protest pictures. A 2006 local vote overwhelmingly favoured bilingual signage for the town, where people are rightly proud of the international reputation of Dingle, even if Irish is the favoured language of a decent number of inhabitants in the surrounding landscape.

In Paddy Bawn Brosnan’s, there is a framed poster of Heffo’s Army, Dublin’s famed 1970s footballers who went to war with Kerry on more than one occasion. It made me do a double take, but it is ultimately a mark of the respect the opposition were held in. Still, ‘Hill 16 was as quiet as Knocknagoshel on a Good Friday morning’ remains a Con Houlihan match report many at the bar can recite with ease.

In North County Dublin, the Fingal Mummers are bringing the day to life in a way that similarly honours local traditions and customs. Man O’War and other pubs feature on their route. At Sandymount, Wren Boys perform on Sandymount Green and in nearby public houses. it may be sometime before we see the Wran in Dublin suburbia again, but anything is possible.

Today is the centenary of the birth of Con Houlihan, the Castle Island (two words, he insisted) writer.

To describe Con as a sportswriter would do a disservice to an extraordinary output across decades, in newspapers like The Kerryman and the Evening Press. Perhaps no other writer is as synonymous with the public houses of Dublin as Con Houlihan, who is memorialised at The Bank, Mulligan’s, The Palace, Chaplin’s, Searson’s, The Dropping Well and a host of other establishments.

He wrote brilliantly on sport, from cricket to his chosen association football club, Saint Patrick’s Athletic. As a child, I recall seeing his enormous physical presence around Inchicore on match days. His observations on public houses were also stand-out articles. Con developed a fantastic formula to his articles:

1. The encouragement of ‘Now read on’ in an opening paragraph.

2. A FÓGRA (notice) at the end, normally a kind shout-out to a friend or good cause. His friend Roy Curtis recalled to me that Con would sometimes leave the pub with a few beermats, on which were scribbled a FÓGRA or two for the coming days.

3. A literary reference which encouraged you to go off and explore something else. Thomas Wolfe was a favourite, but others abounded. An article on Saint Pat’s made reference to The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By, owing to Inchicore’s railway heritage.

He viewed pubs as great democratic spaces. When asked by Declan Lynch in Hot Press what constituted freedom his mind, Con insisted:

To me freedom is a lovely concept, but to bring it down to an ordinary level, it’s having enough to eat and drink, having a house that isn’t crowded, and most important, being able to go out and play billards or have a few drinks, and speak your mind.

Con Houlihan, understandably, enjoys a full chapter in The Dublin Pub: A Social and Cultural History. He is also peppered throughout it, in a way that I quickly realised was both unavoidable and to be welcomed. One story he alluded to in a column was that of W.B Yeats being brought to a Dublin pub - presumably for the first time - and quickly wishing to leave it.

If this story sounds familiar, perhaps you’ve been in the snug of Toner’s, where a mural tells the tale of Oliver St. John Gogarty bringing Yeats to the premises. There are variations in the telling of this tale, but the most common one is that Yeats said words to the effect of ‘I have now seen a pub so would you kindly take me home.’

The version of this story told by Con Houlihan was different:

The great man had never consumed a pint of stout or even half a pint. And so he asked his friend and fellow poet, F. R. Higgins, to help him repair the flaw. Higgins took him into Mulligan’s in Dublin’s Poolbeg Street about six o’clock on a Friday evening.

It was pay day and the dockers were building up a head of steam. ‘Higgins,’ said Yeats, ‘please take me out.’

And so, Mr. Houlihan sent me down the rabbit hole of trying to get to the bottom of this mystery. All credit to the broadcaster W. R. Rodgers, who produced a brilliant series of radio broadcasts entitled Irish Literary Portraits for the BBC, in which he interviewed the survivors of an extraordinary literary generation. Later published in print, the writer known as Brinsley MacNamara told Rodgers of Yeats:

The only thing he never really got used to was the fact that poets and writers might be found sometimes in the public houses of the town, and he never ventured into one of them. There’s a story that Yeats once approached Fred Higgins and he said ‘Higgins, do you know I have never been in a pub in my life and I’d like to go into a pub.’

So Higgins came to me and he asked me what was the most likely pub now to which we might bring Yeats without horrifying him by what he’d see there in the shape of literature and other things. And we decided on one pub, and Higgins went along with him there, and they called for some mild drink and Yeats looked around and he said, ‘Higgins, I don’t like it. Lead me out again.’

If it was the poet F.R Higgins who accompanied Yeats on this fact-finding mission, Yeats could have picked a better companion. In the same series, Frank O’Connor recounted that Higgins ‘was always getting hit by somebody in a pub, and it was usually in an argument about what he used to call ‘pouettry.’ There is no memorial to Higgins and Yeats in Mulligan’s, though the snug in Toner’s today recalls the drink that wasn’t.

Needless to say, W.B Yeats was no great pintman, but the pub wasn’t completely alien to him. He was once part of the gathering of poets to be found in Ye Olde Chesire Cheese, a London institution. In that city today, The William Butler Yeats on London’s Fonthill Road is named in honour of the poet.

FÓGRA: A new painting of Con Houlihan by Dingle painter Liam O’Neill will be unveiled in The Palace Bar tomorrow. All are welcome.