Trade Names:Browne's pub, on a prominent corner in Gorey, is very much at the heart of things in the town, writes Rose Doyle

Joe Browne runs a pub on a corner at 45 Main Street, Gorey, Co Wexford. It's an easy building to spot, distinctively lovely plasterwork making it worth looking at even before you know it's a pub.

The plasterwork is younger than the building, put there in 1907 by a master craftsman/customer called Dunbar.

A preservation order ensures Dunbar's workmanship will endure, though it has a protector in Joe Browne anyway.

Joe Browne says he likes Browne's Pub, that it's part of him. It would be harder to meet a more relaxed publican. Or one who cares as much about his customers. Or one with so many sides to him.

He's particularly proud of having been president of the Vintners Federation of Ireland for two years from 2002. The Brownes, he says, came to Wexford with the Norman de Bruns in the 12th century and never left. His story-telling style is laconic and the picture forms slowly.

"There was always a pub on this spot," he says, pouring me a cup of green tea, "one can be traced back to 1798 but there was some sort of pub on this corner before that when a landlord called Hunter Gown used drink here and collect tenants' rents. It goes back even further but I don't know a lot about earlier times."

More recently, after the Klondike gold rush, the pub was bought and run by a man called Hall who'd made money in the Klondike.

"Hall has descendents in Limerick, who called here once," Joe Brown says. "Flusk bought from Hall and the Mulligan family bought from Flusk and that was where my family came into things.

"My aunt was a Browne who married a Mulligan over 100 years ago. She didn't like Gorey, thought it too busy, so she went to Craanford, out the road, and gave the pub to her nephew, Laurence Browne, to run. Laurence eventually inherited from his aunt and married a woman from Liverpool who was always known as Mrs Browne. They had no children. Laurence Browne was my father's uncle and, just before the second World War, my father inherited the pub from him. After my father died, in 1974, it came to me. I'm not married and it looks as if I'll be leaving it to a nephew or niece too."

He makes it sound simple, the gentle progression of a property through the ranks of family. But then he fills in the details.

"My mother's family were publicans too," he says. "Her grandfather came from Ferns, where they had a spirit grocer and butchers. This was a spirit grocers at one time too," he grins, "we might have to go back to the grocery side the way things are going."

Joe Browne's father, Peter, was born in Craanford, four miles from Gorey, the only son of four children born to small farmer Richard Browne and his wife Margaret.

"Great uncle Laurence wanted him to help in the pub. So my father was brought here in 1927 when he was 11. They were hard times. Larry Browne and his wife had already looked after and reared three to four other nephews here. They were older than my father and their parents had been killed in an accident. They all emigrated to America and their families are still there.

"My father came when those nephews went to New York and spent his whole life here in the pub. He had a little bit of land outside Gorey too. He loved the land and used keep a few cattle and milk them. He never got the land out of his system."

When Peter Browne married Betty Moulds (from Camolin, Co Wexford) in 1945-46, Mrs Laurence Browne went back to Liverpool.

"My father had another pub in Courtown and had to work very hard, all the time. Everyone knew everyone else then and the pub really was the hub of all things social. My father was considered a quiet, gentle sort of man and a bit of a singer. He used sing to the cattle. I think that's where my singing comes from."

And so, casually, something else of Joe Browne, publican, is revealed.

A baritone, with a Feis Ceoil gold medal to his credit, he "studied voice with Dr Veronica Dunne for seven years, in the College of Music. I sang in the Wexford Opera Festival for two years and formed the Young Irish Artists with Virginia Kerr, now taken over by the Irish Opera Company."

He was tempted to make singing his life but "knew I wasn't good enough to make it internationally. I was a big fish in a small pond."

Joe Browne is the youngest boy in a family of four sons and one daughter. His eldest brother, Peter, has a pub at Rourke's Cross, Falksmills, Co Wexford; his brothers Laurence and Vincent are teachers and his sister Florence is married in Canada. "I had a very happy childhood, growing up here in the pub. We had to work - wash the Guinness bottles after school on Tuesday and bottle it on Thursday. The Guinness would arrive at the railway station and be delivered here by John Fennell in barrels. We got a Sunday tuppence as pocket-money. I'd help out in the pub too. The customers were mostly men; with two snugs where women used drink. There were some great characters, it was sort of like an extended family. Their children drink in the pub now, this is very much a local. I liked the pub then and I like it now."

Joe Browne was studying music in Dublin when his father died.

"I was the one in the family available, more or less, the others all had major exams and such. For three years we worked the place between us, my brothers and I, but someone had to take over so I came back full-time in 1977. There were only about five drinks to deal with then - whiskey, rum, port, sherry, Guinness of course, and brandy at Christmas. I didn't intend spending my life here," he laughs, "but I have. I got involved with the local choral group and would help Paul Funge with the Gorey Arts Festival. My mother was still here and used do B&B. We had all sorts of people staying here; Garech Browne and the Earl of Sligo, and singer Helen Shapiro when she was touring Ireland. My mother died in 1995. I turned the family diningroom into a lounge - there had only been a bar until then."

Drinking habits have changed, he says. "People drink mostly at night now, never during the day. Everyone's working, of course, which is good. And I never thought I'd be selling so much wine. I'm interested in wine and remember introducing the first wine 25 years ago. I used buy from a guy in Limerick, Santa Rita from Chile which was unusual in the days when Black Tower and Blue Nun were the sole wines! Only women drank wine originally but you see more men drinking it in pubs today. The pint of Guinness is the main seller still, mostly to men. I remember my mother wouldn't serve a woman a pint, it wasn't ladylike she said!"

He thought the smoking ban would "devastate" the pub business. "But it hasn't. Breathalysing has done more damage. I don't condone drink driving," and he streses this, "but drinking at home is dangerous. There's a pub a week closing around the country.

"When you lose a pub a part of the community goes. We, as publicans, are responsible servers and know our customers, are friends with them, went to school with them. If you're drinking at home who'll tell you you've had enough?"

He worries about the lot of the bachelor farmer too: "Condemned to being alone, getting cabin fever. I miss an awful lot of older people from the outlying areas who don't come any more. They come into town to shop but not any longer at night for a drink. There's a sense in the pubs of a part of the country dying."