An Irishman's Diary

WHEN THIS dark period in the nation’s history passes, as it eventually must, I wonder if one of its legacies will be a new poster on the walls of Dublin pubs (assuming there are any pubs left then).

Instead of the classic ensemble of writers that decorates many bars now, I foresee a pictorial line-up of the “Great Irish Economists” who dominated public discourse during the current era. Where once were Yeats, Wilde, and George Bernard Shaw, maybe, as a warning to future generations, we’ll have pictures of McCarthy, McWilliams, and George Lee.

A brooding Constantin Gurdgiev might replace James Joyce in the pantheon. Our own Flann – I mean Dan – O’Brien would be there too. And the Samuel Beckett figure, of course, would be Morgan Kelly, whose bleak portrayals of the human condition have already rivalled All That Fall and Worstward Ho (I await his Endgame with trepidation).

Thoughts of such a poster – disturbing, I know – were prompted by the passing last week of a famous Dublin publican, Ned Doheny. Ned was a gentleman, by all accounts. And it was through no fault of his that, in life, he became accidentally synonymous with the dismal science.

Together with that of his friend and business partner, Tommy Nesbitt – still very much alive, happily – Ned’s surname is now immortalised on one Dublin’s greatest pubs, even though both men sold the business more than 20 years ago.

But by then, the bar had already secured another, more particular kind of fame, one that foreshadowed the times in which we live. It dated from the last recession, the early 1980s, when a group of economists, including Colm McCarthy, were among the clientele.

As their shared world view increasingly leaked into public debate, they were dubbed the “Doheny and Nesbitt School of Economics”. And although no Dublin bar can be guaranteed free of economists these days, the singular reputation of D N’s has stuck every since.

Being both from Tipperary, the former owners were themselves examples of a phenomenon that only an economist could explain. It used to be proverbial, and the impression is supported by anecdotal memory, that at least half the pubs in Dublin were once owned by people from two counties: Tipp and Cavan.

This was one of those classic duopolies, like Coke and Pepsi, or Celtic and Rangers. But so far as I know, any rivalry was friendly. There was no northside-southside carve-up. And neither county ever attempted complete domination. I believe the economic term for the arrangement is a “Nash equilibrium”.

In any case, the two Tipp men’s path to pub ownership was equally traditional. They first served their time as barmen, at home and abroad. In the late 1950s, they worked in New York, in separate but similarly named Third Avenue establishments, the Blarney Rose and Blarney Stone. After that, enough money made, they returned to Dublin and bought what used to be Connolly’s Pub.

It took the 1960s a while to start swinging in these parts. Hard though it is to believe now, Merrion Row used to be as dead as the residents of its Huguenot cemetery, especially at weekends. Then a band called the Dubliners started playing in a local pub and the area became suddenly trendy. In that well-known economic model, the rising tide of O’Donoghue’s lifted all boats.

Doheny Nesbitt’s never did music. Nor, except early on, did they do television. In fact, the pub was one of the first to have a TV, and Tommy Nesbitt recalls a day in 1963 when people crowded in to watch RTÉ’s Charles Mitchell announcing grim news from Dallas. But soon after that, the television was thrown out (although it’s back again these days, in full plasma-screen glory).

Crucially, too, the pub avoided one of those late-20th-century makeovers as a lounge bar, thereby benefiting from the fashion for authenticity that set in around the same time as the school of economics. Accidental events helped too. In the 1970s, a group of “barristers and doctors” migrated to D N’s from their former local in Leeson Street, after a row. They never left.

It may be ironic that the old Doheny Nesbitt’s became synonymous with economics, because it was also in the heart of what passed for Dublin’s Latin Quarter during the middle of the last century. Sure enough, the clientele did once indeed include Patrick Kavanagh and other writers from the famous poster.

But it was proximity to government that gave the bar its defining image. Tommy Nesbitt recalls a TD complaining loudly once that the country was run from Doheny Nesbitt’s rather than the Dáil. It certainly functioned on occasion as an unofficial third chamber.

This being so, the two men who stood behind the counter for so long, listening discreetly, must have been privy to the odd State secret. Tommy, however, still refuses to confirm or deny that he knows stuff. And as for any privileged information Ned Doheny may have known about customers, like all good barmen, he took it with him to the grave.

Speaking of Dublin pubs and Patrick Kavanagh, his fellow Monaghan man Peter Duffy is performing a one-man show based on The Great Hunger all this week in the International Bar in Wicklow Street. Performances are twice daily at 1pm and 6pm. There are also talks by Kavanagh experts, starting each day at 5pm.