From Andalucia to Dubai, the 'Irish pub' abroad has become ubiquitous in recent years. But it looks now as if pints of the black stuff have had their day, reports FIONA McCANN

YOU’VE FORKED OUT oodles of euro for the ticket, packed your bags, removed your shoes in irritating airport queues and hopped on a plane for destinations new, only to touch down and find yourself confronted with the very thing you thought you’d left behind: an Irish pub. Because chances are that if you’ve been anywhere since the early 1990s, be it the 4,000ft-deep Colca Canyon in Peru, or at in the Himalayan foothills of Pokhara, Nepal, you’ve come across an “Irish pub”.

Also known as McPubs, these ubiquitous drinking emporiums have been spreading like wildfire, promising “craic” to all-comers since the pioneers in the field, Brian and Kevin Loughney, first brought their Dublin pub, Kitty O’Shea’s, to Paris in 1986. Twenty-three years on and you can’t shake a shillelagh without hitting an Irish pub, yet recent reports suggest that this international phenomenon may now have reached saturation point.

News that the Irish Pub Company has called a meeting with creditors appears to indicate a downturn in fortunes for this self-described “Irish pub concept designer”, which has designed more than 1,000 pubs since it was established in 1991. If you’ve ever downed a pint of the plain stuff in Scruffy Murphy’s in Edinburgh, or taken a tipple in Fadó in Annapolis, you’ve seen first-hand the company’s work, which focuses on architecture, design, consultancy and branding.

Yet, given that a meeting with creditors normally signifies bad news is on the way, does this mean time is being called on the McPub?

“Like everything, things get trendy, and then they’re not,” points out Lonely Planet travel writer Fionn Davenport, who has witnessed “McPubs” cropping up all across the globe, from Bangkok to Buenos Aires. “One decade it’s Irish theme bars, so Spaniards in Gijon are all saying ‘Irish bars, let’s go there!’, but then the next thing is lounge bars or sushi restaurants.”

As Davenport sees it, it was to be expected that as Irish pubs became ubiquitous, they would lose some of their attraction. “It’s the inevitable consequence of success,” he says. “It dilutes and renders meaningless the very thing that led to the success in the first place. All of a sudden there are mid-sized towns in Andalucia with four Irish bars all exactly the same.”

So what made them so popular in the first place? “At the heart of the Irish bar is that increasingly rare quality the Irish still hold on to, which is friendliness,” Davenport says. “That idea of a welcoming home, that myth of the chat around the couple of pints, a friendly place with a bit of music – that’s at the heart of it, and in all the years I’ve been amazed at just how many people really believe it, hook, line and sinker.”

Yet, having Brand Ireland associated with boozing is not always a positive thing. “Lonely Planet runs surveys all the time about things that people like and people don’t like. Inevitably, it’s always ‘I love the Irish bar . . . I don’t understand why Irish people drink so much’.”

Added to the problem of transplanting Irish drinking customs (“If you look at the way people drink in Irish bars abroad, it’s done very differently. They’ll each have one drink, and nurse it for ages,” says Davenport) is that of transplanting the ambience. “An Irish bar, if you think about it, it’s heart and hearth. The peat fire, snuggling up away from the outside elements. It was never conceived to exist in 40 degrees of blazing sunshine.”

Yet, none of this has stopped the concept from taking off globally, with Irish-themed flagstone-floored, wood-panelled watering holes even turning up in the Arabian desert.

“The weirdest place I’ve ever seen a McPub is in Dubai,” says Davenport, who visited the Irish Village pub there several years ago. “It was so hot they had air-conditioning units the size of jet turbines . . . This enormous expense to create the homely sense of a small Burren bar.” He laughs. “It was just like Ennistymon, but 40 degrees hotter.”

So are the heady days of the Irish bar’s world domination behind us?

“It has had its day,” says Davenport. “I’m not saying they’re dying, that nobody’s ever going to go into an Irish bar abroad again but they’ve reached full market saturation.” But what will replace it? “What I’ve noticed in the last 10 years is this absolute spread of the generic New York-type cool, hip, drinking lounge.”

Out with the pints of the black stuff and in with the Manhattans, so? Not necessarily.

According to Davenport, there’s still much to be said for the Irish pub, though in order for the concept to survive, some of the culture it cultivates may have to be examined.

“I think that behind this very real and very authentic attraction that we have, the traditional Irish pub, is hidden an awful lot of bunkum and nonsense that therefore it’s okay that we defend, or that we never address – the problems that come with a drinking culture,” he says. “It’s about separating one from the other, it’s about recognising the worth of an Irish bar without saying that everything that happens inside an Irish bar is okay.”