Little did Charlie Haughey know when he first came out with his summation of the MacArthur case, he little knew it would be used first as a description for himself and later, as a shorthand for an era now gone but not forgotten. Haughey's 1982 utterance;". . . a bizarre happening, an unprecedented situation . . . a grotesque situation . . . an almost unbelievable mischance," became: "He is grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented," courtesy of Conor Cruise O'Brien. Which in turn became GUBU, and a catch-phase was born.
GUBU lay low for a while, then reared its head briefly when Haughey's alleged misdemeanours first started to emerge a couple of years ago. But now GUBU is back and it's back in a form that says as much about the late 1990s as the early one said about the early 1980s. For the new GUBU isn't a comment on politics, and it isn't a criticism of an epoch of croney-ism: it's a new bar.
Surely it says much about the distance we have travelled since 1982 that such a politically damning phrase could be used for a trendy, downtown drinking spot? When it opens next week, it will be full of people who have never understood what GUBU was about, or heard of it and think it's a pretty funny name for a bar or perhaps have never heard of GUBU at all . . . What's more important about GUBU from the point of view of its customers is that it is the latest Dublin pub from Jay Bourke and Eoin Foyle, the people who brought you Thomas Read's, The Globe, The Front Lounge, the Bodega in Cork, Odessa restaurant, Eden restaurant and, more recently, The Garavogue in Sligo and the Roundy in Cork.
What's more important for arbiters of style and property-hawks is that it is situated on Capel Street in Dublin's north city centre. Because wherever these guys open a pub tends to become rather trendy in a very short space of time. They did it with Parliament Street when they opened Front Lounge and Thomas Read's; they did it with the George's Street area by opening the Globe and the Odessa; they rehabilitated The Roundy, a Castle Street pub in Cork which had been in a permanent state of decline; and now it looks as if Capel Street is to be given the same treatment.
They are not the only new-wave publicans to have this effect on an area. The O'Regan brothers, Hugh and Declan, have a similar impact when they open a bar - not only the bar itself but the whole area inherits a new buzz - as the Front Lounge, the Bailey, Searsons and the Life Bar illustrate.
Of course, it's a moot point whether these publicans have created the new buzz about an area or whether they have just mastered the knack of predicting trends. Certainly in the case of GUBU and Parnell Street, there is already much to suggest the area is about to explode into a kind of trend-led growth that will make those in charge of Temple Bar grind their teeth with envy.
Years ago, when artists started to flee from Temple Bar because of rising rents, Capel Street was one of the places they fled to. Part of the attraction was that it was not a chi-chi place - it was, and is to this day, a busy and truly eclectic shopping street where Dance World sits alongside the Scout Shop, the Davis Gallery, McQuillans Tools and numerous sex shops and army surplus stores. Trendy design emporiums they ain't - but then that ain't so trendy any more. Even before GUBU opens its doors, the Hugh O'Regan/John Rocha duet in the Morrison Hotel around the corner and the internationally trendy photographer Perry Ogden's studios on Strand Street added a certain cachet to the area. Tellingly, when Kevin Kavanagh decided to move his small, artist-friendly gallery Jo Rain out of Temple Bar, it was to Strand Street, just off Capel Street, that he re-located.
But in a way, to look at the changes in fortunes of the areas to which these pubs have moved is to overlook the bigger picture. Because in a way, what these pubs sing loudest about is a new wave of pub culture, a new generation of expectations and a new way in which Ireland is learning to look at itself. In all the backlash to the hype about Ireland's trendiness, it's easy to forget that only 10 years ago, the word nightclub in Dublin meant a Leeson Street winebar.
Even if the city is not quite the thriving hip capital that Elle magazine and Conde Nast Traveller would have their readers believe, it's still quite impressive that we've got from the last-minute lottery of Leggs to club capital in such a short time.
Pub culture, too, has changed immeasurably. In the past five years, velvet couches have become more common than bar stools and snugs, and elliptical mirrors, suede-effect cube pouffes and lightboxes abound. Whereas "lounge" used to be the room between the kitchen and the dining room, it is now a description applied by every super-pub and club to its own style of decor, music and cocktail choice in an attempt to woo a new generation of drinkers.
Interestingly, the man who many credit with introducing the lounge concept into Ireland - when he designed and then managed the Odessa restaurant in Dublin's Dame Court some five years ago - has also been in charge of the design of both the Roundy and of GUBU. Inasmuch as anybody can personify a change in thinking and a new way of doing things, Peter O'Kennedy is it.
He has no formal design or architecture qualifications under his belt but he does have a rake of other, and some would say more relevant, experience instead. He spent his 20s as a drummer with the Golden Horde and was a founder member of cult Cork band, Nine Wassies From Bainne. His artistic experience is equally eclectic. Obsessed at one stage with Fiat Bambino cars, he staged exhibitions in the Project Arts Centre, France and Argentina, devoted to the cars.
An exhibition in Marseilles as part of the Imaginaire Irlandais festival a couple of years back saw him placing two cars in a car park, setting them moving independently and letting them plough into each other ceaselessly, like bumper cars. When he was asked by long-time friend Eoin Foyle to design the Odessa, he based it on places he loved in the East Village in New York, places with an all-day menu where you could drop in and drop out at any time. Velvet couches and big armchairs were an essential part of that decor and lounge, Dublin-style was born. So it's a little shocking to find that GUBU is not going there.
`It definitely won't be lounge," O'Kennedy confirms succinctly as he paces around the unfinished GUBU premises. "Lounge has got so up its own arse and anyway, it's kind of difficult to socialise when you're all miles apart in these big armchairs. I wanted somewhere where people can sit up at a table and drink. A proper drinking establishment."
Later in the pub across the road (Jack Nealons - definitely not lounge), he expands further. "I don't know that people realise how much everybody plagiarises Eoin and Jay . . . There's a sense in which we are all very derivative in Ireland. We take a trip abroad and look at lots of photos and at other pubs and then imitate what's going on, which is fine but it's not that innovative . . . I could so easily have just done another wallpaper interior but I really didn't want to."
Which is not to say O'Kennedy doesn't acknowledge his own debt to the past in GUBU - it's just that he's using his influences in a more independent, rigorous fashion. The bar has a base of terrazzo that smooth, marble-chip flooring that will be instantly recognisable to anybody who attended a convent in the 1950s. "It's interesting because it used to be a really cheap material when labour was plentiful but now the economy has changed and labour is at a premium, it's an expensive surface."
The bar, meanwhile, is made of cast concrete with a pattern of triangles that will be familiar to parishioners of Raheny church - O'Kennedy was at a wedding there and was rather taken with the stone carvings. Such diverse inspirations will sit alongside fibre-optic light installations, curtains in clashing strips of colour, a pool table, and straight-backed oak chairs that O'Kennedy is hoping will be "non-design, just saying `chair' and nothing more".
It's a peculiar aspiration for a designer but then O'Kennedy isn't pretending to be a typical designer and GUBU isn't trying to be the same as anything that has gone before. It's not that he, Bourke or Foyle are trying to say or do anything profound - they're just using a good name to open up another pub. But when it becomes the new place to be seen this winter, it will create a whole new set of connotations for the word GUBU and a whole new generation of people who think of nothing more than a trendy bar when the phrase is mentioned.
And if the lounge pattern is anything to go by, it may be the start of a whole new era in pub culture, one dominated more by non-design and convent flooring than either smoke-filled back bars or velvet sofas.
GUBU is at 7-8 Capel Street, Dublin 1