SOCIAL HISTORY: A Pint of Plain: Tradition, Change and the Fate of the Irish Pub By Bill BarichBloomsbury, 242pp. £10.99
A GOOD CHALLENGE, mused Leopold Bloom, would be to cross Dublin without passing a pub. That trick might be more easily done nowadays, as bars and petrol stations make way for apartments. Bill Barich argues that the traditional pub is (like some of its truest supporters) “on its last legs”. What remains for the wrinkly drinkers can be classified roughly as (i) trophy establishments (ii) neighbourhood bars, often non-descript and (iii) corporate outlets.
His book, a lament for a lost national "soul", imaged in the despoliation of Tara, recalls a work of similarly sad-toned realism from the 1980s, Vincent Buckley's Memory Ireland. There another honorary Irishman engaged in an almost terrified search for some persistence of a viable society. But where Buckley located the national amnesia in the image of a vacant advance-factory dubbed Memory Ireland, in south Dublin, Barich detects it in the emptying of pubs. His conclusions are based, of course, on licensed premises. Irish bars have been emptying ever since WB Yeats plaintively asked a friend in Toner's "will you kindly take me out of here?". But few would ever have expected to see roadside advertising hoardings urging Irish people to visit their pubs.
There is something of the Petrarchan lover about Barich’s unrequited search for “the perfect local”. He gamely pursues his quest, from the remodelled bars of Ranelagh to the rococo orientalism of Café en Seine (of which he is far too critical – it is surely one of the few cultural glories of Tiger Ireland). He moves from rural grocer-shebeens to the famously cramped Dawson Lounge in which you can’t raise a glass without hitting three people with the spillages.
Profound and perceptive, Barich notices that staring into the bottom of a glass is the nearest experience that some men will achieve to Yogic meditation; and that the word “curate” suggests real affinities between the roles of barman and priest – listening to confessions, dispensing advice, chastening the flock.
Some famous proprietors and barmen are memorialised in fine phrases. Jack Birchall of Ranelagh is “as eagle-eyed as a ship’s captain navigating a choppy sea”. And the legendary Paddy O’Brien of McDaids’ golden era “has for drinkers of a certain age that status of a saint, as Matt Talbot has for abstainers”. McDaids, whose inner sanctum was known as “the intensive care unit”, is cited as proof positive that “no pub can have room enough for so many sizeable egos”.
Barich neglects the extent to which pubs once functioned like literary stock-exchanges – writers frequented them in hopes of commissions, reviews, contacts. Being ritually “barred” from one of these emporia became a perverse badge of honour, a rite of passage in the emergence of a writing talent. Patrick Kavanagh (who invented a pub-crawl known as The Baggot Street Gallop) seems to have been banned from almost as many establishments as his friend-and-enemy, Brendan Behan. A sardonic younger author once told me that the literary reputations of both men recovered greatly after their deaths, basically because they were no longer around to muck them up.
Here Behan is reported as, rather plaintively, explaining his on-off drinking sprees: “When I’ve been off for a fortnight, I feel so good, I want to celebrate”. More might have been written here of the heartache and suffering visited by so many sensitive topers on themselves and on loved ones. It may well be that in Ireland drinking, as much as acting, is the shy person’s revenge. It certainly allowed fastidious and intelligent men like Behan, Kavanagh and Flann O’Brien to enact in public the role of “gas bloody man” and “Stage Writer” rather than face the anguish of real writing in troubled privacy. All three, of course, anticipated Barich in opining that Irish pubs, like Irish eccentrics, ain’t what they used to be.
The Irish didn’t invent the pub, says Barich, but made it their own, one of those “third spaces” which is neither home nor workplace. Like the beach in Brazil, the pub was/is a democratic space in which strangers of varying backgrounds can mingle freely together. That is the positive side of the story. Barich tells it well, getting many characters to open up about their lives. In the process, he demolishes myths, including the belief that Guinness is made from Liffey water (actually it comes from streams in Kildare).
The negative side is that form of licensed mutual terrorism known as the “rounds system”, which the author rightly deplores.
He might also have noted how the extension of licences into the small hours has made parenthood a nightmare for many. Having a son or daughter out drinking in the mean streets until 3am (as opposed to knowing they’d catch the last bus home at 11.30pm in the old days) is an experience which has given some people a deeper understanding of what it must have been like to have a son away in the trenches of the first World War.
Barich is as caustic as a convivial American should be about daft karaoke nights or trivia quizzes which kill all real conversation. He has a built-in scepticism, which leads him to distinguish folk groups who are flogging CDs to tourists from more serious musicians whose focus is on the practice of their art rather than the pockets of their audience. Yet the truth is that even great singers, like the late Luke Kelly, sometimes had to make the rafters ring in the Abbey Tavern. It is, however, a mark of Barich’s dignified scepticism that he comes to question his own search for absolute authenticity as just another luxury item on the desiderata list of the cultural tourist.
There may be reasons, other than a decline in sociability, for the collapse of Irish pubs: reasons grimly anticipatory of the subsequent death of the Tiger. Crazy cash was paid for pubs in the late 1990s and the absurdly high prices with which owners sought to recoup their investment led many drinkers to stay away. Some pubs began to sell food, in a clever attempt to diversify profits and to confuse the tax authorities as to their actual weekly “take”. Stricter enforcement of laws against drink-driving caused many to discover the pleasures of quaffing wine in the home. The smoking ban kept some folk away, without enticing many new customers in. Even as Diageo-sponsored Irish pubs conquered the world (piping music by Riverdance and U2), the men who had paid the mad money in Dublin were already selling up.
Despite that trend, there are still lots of nice pubs – and many other places in which to socialise as well. Barich is honest enough to admit that Irish people now like mochas and chicken masalas as much as frothy pints; and that the country can never stand still. His own attempt to photograph the moving object that is the pub bears this out, for his slightly sniffy reference to the Thomas Read group as being “for the young, the hip” seems already historical. But his general diagnoses contain much that is thoughtful and true. It may be, however, that James Joyce was nearer the mark when he observed that Ireland would only be fully free when you could get a decent cup of coffee in every street.
Declan Kiberd is professor of Anglo-Irish Literature at UCD. The Art of Everyday Living, a study of wisdom literature from Homer and the Bible through Dante to Joyce, will be published this summer