Among the Flannoraks gathered in Strabane for this week’s International Flann O’Brien Conference is Mick Gleeson, a man who was behind one of the finest tributes ever paid to the writer.
For about 20 years from the mid-1970s, Mick ran the late and still lamented An Béal Bocht in Dublin’s Charlemont Street, a pub that doubled as a theatre.
Mind you, as he tells it, the premises was not named primarily for the 1941 novel (written by the real-life Flann, Brian O’Nolan, under his Irish Times pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen).
Although a committed Mylesian even then, Mick was also paying back-handed tribute to some of his customers, whose hard-luck stories would have given the novel’s Bonaparte Ó Coonasa a run for his lack of money.
Gleeson came to own the venue only after being outbid for a series of other bars, most notably O’Donoghue’s of Merrion Row, spiritual home of The Dubliners.
When that was up for auction in 1977, his bank gave him a green light to go all in. But having started at £88,000, the price rose to nearly twice that, long before which he gave up: outbid not for the first time by the late Dessie Hynes.
So instead, he turned to Charlemont Street, a tough locality then on the southern edge of the inner city, and picked what became An Béal Bocht for a mere £58,000.
It was a trail-blazing pub in several ways. “We had a lot of women on the staff, for one thing,” Mick recalls. This was controversial with some older male customers, who were sceptical as to whether female bar tenders could be trusted with the holy sacrament of pouring a pint properly:
“They’d be asking: will you get Pat or Mick to do that?” he says. “For Jayzus sake, it’s only liquid in a glass.”
It was also an Irish-friendly bar. Customers were encouraged to speak the native language, if they could. And then there was the theatre, born from a genuine interest in the form: “I wanted a place where you could have a drink while watching a play, not just where you watched a play while drinking.”
It was a logical step, eventually, that An Béal Bocht the venue would host a stage adaptation of An Béal Bocht the book. Directed by Ronan Smith, this was done first in English, as The Poor Mouth, and became a huge success. The show ran for about five years, Mick thinks: “It was like a Dublin version of The Mousetrap.”
Then in 1991, when the novel’s 50th anniversary and the 25th of O’Nolan’s death combined, Gleeson decided to stage the play in Irish. His regular producer thought him mad. “Irish?” he said: “Nobody will come.”
But central to the plan was to get Mick Lally, gaeilgeoir and national treasure, involved. When they visited his house in nearby Portobello for talks, the host produced a bottle of “fíon bán” (which means “white wine” literally, but in Lally’s Mayo dialect signified poitín).
The visitors “fell out of the house” next morning with a deal. At first, they thought the play as gaeilge would be lucky to last a week. It ran for almost two months, which must be another record.
Like Myles, Mick used to have a link to The Irish Times. His wife Eileen Lynam was secretary to the great Douglas Gageby, whose many editorial reforms included ensuring that the late-era O’Nolan, by then a sick man, was paid for his work even when it wasn’t used.
Eileen’s jobs include proof-reading advance copies of the cryptic crossword and raising queries with its creator Derek Crozier. Mick passively inhaled her expertise, to the extent that he became an embodiment of a character from one of Myles’s classic sketches.
That’s the one about a man who buys a first edition of the paper, hot off the presses, and spends all night grimly working out the crossword just so that he can go to the golf club next day, feigning not to have seen it yet, and help his neighbour with the hard ones in return for the glory of hearing: “Begob you’re quick!”
Mick’s contribution wasn’t as calculated as that. Still, like a good barman, he had the answers when needed.
After conferences in Vienna, Rome, Prague, Salzburg, Dublin, Boston, and Cluj-Napoca, the International Flann O’Brien Society has brought its biennial symposium back home this year, to O’Nolan’s Tyrone birthplace. But of course Strabane is also international, being just across the river and an EU frontier from Lifford.
I was reminded of this on Thursday night in The Farmer’s Home - a former dwelling house, now a lovely pub of many rooms – when asking a group of presumed Tyrone supporters how they expected to do against Dublin in Saturday’s All-Ireland Football Quarter final.
On closer inspection, they were all from Donegal and looking forward to thrashing the Diarist’s native Monaghan in the curtain-raiser. Tensions remained high along the interface well into the night. But at time of writing, there have been no major incidents.
