A Pub in the Family
In 1980, the Green family in Kinvara, a fishing village in southern County Galway, finally stopped selling groceries, 120 years after Michael Green opened his pub on the first floor of a three-story building opposite the harbor. The shelves now are stocked with a mind-boggling variety of liquor bottles but otherwise the place is little changed. Michael’s son, Martin, ran the pub after him, necessitating no alteration in the name that still hangs over the door: M. Green. Mary Green runs the pub, now, moving tables around to accommodate the traditional music sessions that erupt spontaneously year-round but especially in summer when everyone congregates as the harbor fills with old sailing ships for an annual festival celebrating Kinvara’s maritime history.
Mary lives above the pub and, for the life of her, she cannot imagine living anywhere else. “It suits me,” she says of pub keeping. “It must be in the blood. I love the people and the conversation and, of course, the craic,” a Gaelic word with no precise English translation. “Fun” is as close an approximation as any to define the expression commonly heard among patrons leaving Green’s after an evening of traditional music. “The craic was mighty at Mary’s tonight!”
The traditional craic might well endure longer than the superpub phenomenon. A poll by The Dubliner magazine this year set out to name the most popular pubs in the capital city. Traditional pubs captured the top five spots of the 1,200 patrons who cast a ballot.
The American television producers who dreamed up “Cheers,” the fictional Boston bar “where everyone knows your name,” could have found the real thing in any Irish town. Pubs embrace strangers—tourists often count the memory of a favorite Irish pub the highlight of a trip to the Emerald Isle—but it is the locals who are every publican’s livelihood.
The Oldest Pub
Sean’s Bar, which advertises itself as the oldest pub in Ireland, is a happy mix of local patrons and travelers. In Athlone, County Westmeath, in the center of Ireland, Sean’s sits alongside the Shannon River. Its sloping floors are less a design feature than a sign of age. In the not unprecedented event of flood, the waters of the Shannon simply roll through the back door and down into the rain-swollen river.
Renovations at the pub in 1970 uncovered construction that dates back to the 9th century. A piece of the exposed clay and mud wall has been preserved under glass and put on display to give patrons a sense of just how old the place is.
Sean Fitzsimons, for whom a stool is permanently positioned at the end of the bar, owns the place, one of 86 pubs in Athlone. A brass plaque informs the uninitiated: “This seat reserved for Sean.” Old photographs and older artifacts decorate the walls. Above Sean’s stool is a clock from the Dublin General Post Office, the site of the doomed Easter Rising against British rule in Ireland in 1916. The rebellion failed but the high-handed decision by the British to execute the leaders in Kilmainham Jail enraged the populace and elevated the rebels to the status of martyrs, paving the way for future battles and, ultimately, the Irish Free State.
The history attracts the tourists, but it is the craic that draws the locals in after Sunday Mass to watch young and old shake off the morning sermon and pull stools up to the pub’s piano for an impromptu session of traditional music. Sean’s has a well-earned reputation as a social gathering place for fiddlers and other local musicians. The scene is especially lively in summer, when the players spill out into the beer garden behind the pub to take inspiration from the Shannon flowing nearby.
Traditional music is as integral to the Irish pub scene as porter and whiskey. The indigenous culture never vanished during centuries of British rule, despite the best efforts of Ireland’s occupiers to wipe out its language and its music. Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eireann, The National Organization for Irish Traditional Music and Musicians, began the revival in the 1920s, as soon as the country obtained its independence. It has helped ensure a robust music scene ever since.
Brian McMullan knows what makes a pub work, here or across the sea in Ireland. It’s the people, not the fake butter churn in the corner or the walls of sepia-toned photographs of sheep on an Irish hillside. “People like the atmosphere, but they come for each other’s company,” he said of the patrons who fill his McMullan’s Irish Pub in his adopted American city. “I don’t get many tourists here; I don’t really want them,” he says. “This is a neighborhood pub.”
Fittingly, that neighborhood is a little more than a mile from the Las Vegas strip, the world’s largest adult theme park. He appreciates the comparison. “We aren’t Disneyland, although I think Disneyland is wonderful,” McMullan says of the faux Irish pubs his company is marketing to the world. “But we are trying to transport you to another world.”
Even if that world is only a fading memory.
