Bridge Over Troubled Porter – Frank McNally on the rise and fall of the ‘loop-liner’

Before the Pint of Plain became your only man (copyright Flann O’Brien), there used also be a popular drink in Dublin called the “loop-liner”. That too was porter. And it too was cheap, notoriously: so much so that its price is one of the few reliably recorded details about it.

During the early years of the 20th century, it sold for “three-halfpence” a pint. This alone, or rather the clientele it encouraged, made it a source of recurring controversy when pub licences came up for consideration.

Courts would hear that the “loop-line trade” attracted the worst kinds of drinker. Increasingly, judges were disinclined to approve renewal applications from the businesses involved.

The drink is presumed to have taken its name from the eyesore bridge of the same name, built across the Liffey between 1889 and 1891 and ever since blocking the view from the city centre of Dublin’s architectural masterpiece.

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One theory is that it originated in nearby bars to serve those working on the bridge. First, some premises offered larger-than-standard measures for twopence. Then the price war escalated and the three-halfpenny pint was born.

The loop-liner was in any case long associated with the quays, although it eventually spread well beyond them. Hence its immortalisation in a Liberties ballad, The Ragman’s Ball, as sung by Ronnie Drew and others:

“Well for eating we had plenty now/As much as we could hold/We drank Brady’s loopline porter/Until round the floor we rolled.”

Speaking of food, although the drink was prized mainly as a cheap route to inebriation, it was also part of a classic meal combination. Or so claimed the leading Dublin lawyer Seymour Bushe, who when expounding on its popularity once to a judge who’d never heard of it, said that when combined with a “pig’s foot sandwich”, it was known as a “crubeen looper”.

The lawyer’s very memorable name will be familiar to all Joycean scholars (and some immature schoolboys). In Ulysses, as Paddy Dignam’s funeral cortege nears Glasnevin, it passes the house where a real-life Samuel Childs was said to have murdered his own brother.

“A gruesome case,” comments Simon Dedalus, adding: “Seymour Bushe got him off.”

The case involving the loop-liner was not as serious as that one, but it was a chance for Bushe to give posterity as well as the judge a bit more detail about the drink.

Alas, he was in skittish mood, emphasising only the extreme frothiness of the beverage and the consequences of same for the customer. “Well, m’lord,” he answered a question from the bench, “the man or woman who drinks loop-liners is like the singer in the song: for ever blowing bubbles.”

More educational was Bushe’s brief primer to the judge on the other products then sold in pubs. As well as explaining the difference between a pint and a “glass”, he listed for his Lordship such delights as the “Guinness Gorge”, the “Strangeways Policeman”, and the “Clonakilty Rassler”.

I’m not sure what the first two there involved but fans of The Third Policeman will recall the publican narrator extolling the virtues of one of his product lines: “It was manufactured in some town in the south and was known as ‘The Wrastler’. If you drank three or four pints of it, it was nearly bound to win.”

Strange to say, although its heyday was in and around 1904, loop-line porter doesn’t seem to have featured in Ulysses or Dubliners. This is doubly remiss because, according to one licence hearing of the time, provision of the cheap drink was almost compulsory for pubs in the markets, where the celebrated Cyclops episode of Ulysses is set.

Moreover, the loop-liner made a cameo appearance in a real-life political scandal of 1903, which had parallels with the Dubliners story Ivy Day in the Committee Room.

That dramatises the moral vacuum in Irish public life a decade after Parnell’s death, via a tale of mercenary canvassers in the municipal elections, working for money and bottles of stout.

The 1903 scandal also has echoes in 2023, involving as it did irregularities of campaign funding. On foot of a recall petition by his rivals, Cllr Patrick Monks of Arran Quay Ward was said in court to have committed a wide range of offences, including the payment of supporters with a counterfeit sixpence.

This had been used to buy “four pints”: an equation that pointed to only one possible product. Sure enough, a witness admitted to laughter that he had been off work on the day in question and amenable to earning “the price of a loop liner”.

Monks appears to have survived the recall attempt. In any case, when he died in 1920, there was no mention of it in write-ups.

And the loop-liner seems to have gone out at around the same time he did. It had disappeared from the archives by the 1920s, unlamented and without an obituary.