Treasure our rural pubs while they
still exist
By Joe Horgan
The Pub was quiet on New Year’s Eve. An ordinary Irish country
pub with a bar and one small room. No big raucous crowd. No squeezing
in the door.
I don’t really know what it was like in other country pubs but it
was quiet in this one.
Another pub in a small nearby village would definitely have been quiet
because it closed earlier this year — but then that is what is happening
in Ireland now.
The small family-run pubs that were once such a characteristic of the
Irish countryside are closing at the rate of nearly one a day.
When the economic boom first exploded one of the initial totems of the
new Ireland was the export around the world of the Irish pub.
In the 90s the pubs we’d always drank in in England — often
backstreet Victorian boozers populated by the 1950s emigrants and their
children — were suddenly joined by a host of Scruffy Murphy’s
and O’Neill’s dotting the High Street.
These Irish theme pubs were a strange experience — all old bicycles
and milk churns.
They were oddly disconcerting albeit they noted the idea that being Irish
in Britain might now be acceptable.
I for one never quite knew what to make of them.
Of course what was odd about them was that they appeared just as the Irish
community pubs and clubs would have felt the change of an ageing emigrant
population and a second and third-generation Irish group readjusting itself
socially.
Strange to think now that the distorted version of a spit and sawdust
Irish country pub the theme pubs represented are also facing up to change.
The end result of that change may end up being like the English countryside
in that the authentic country pubs will be few and far between.
From where I sit in the middle still of Ireland’s economic boom
I can think within a small radius of seven pubs that have closed within
the last few years.
In the past two years more than 600 Irish pubs — most of them in
rural locations — have closed. That is not to say you’d have
to travel far in Ireland for a pint but it is fairly remarkable all the
same.
Yet consumption of alcohol is at record levels and we still out-booze
nearly all of our European neighbours. The Celtic Tiger hasn’t bought
sobriety by any stretch of the imagination.
The demise of the Irish country pub is, strangely enough, not really about
drinking at all. After all, most of these pubs thrived even when there
wasn’t the money for extra luxuries that there is now and even when
the Pioneer movement was a very real part of Irish life.
No it is not really about Irish drinking at all. It is about a changing
Irish society. This is now the Ireland of the smoking ban, road carnage
and drink-driving laws. This is now the Ireland of new sophisticates who
stay in and drink wine from South America instead of pints from Cork or
Dublin. This is now the Ireland of dinner parties instead of bodies around
a pub table or counter.
This is indeed a country where those rural people in their 50s, 60s and
70s, those who lived through the hard times in rural Ireland, those who
remain resolutely old-fashioned in their social habits, are those most
affected by the social changes in a society transfixed with the new and
the urban.
It is also the case that the enforcement of laws aimed at counteracting
the excesses of this new society, at curbing binge drinking, decreasing
the carnage on roads dominated by new cars and the deaths of young men,
actually impinge most upon those who are not really part of that new society.
In the nearest sizeable town to where we live there is still a very lively
social scene. There are still a good smattering of pubs. Like anywhere
else some are better than others. Some are friendly and welcoming, some
aloof and arrogant. Only a few though, in the many that dot the town,
still retain some element of making you feel distinctly that you are in
an Irish country town.
Sitting in the others you could be anywhere from Birmingham to Cork city
to London.
One has even been refurbished in such a way that it has all the hallmarks
of an Irish theme pub — which in an Irish country town is truly
strange.
Have we come so far that we now market and package and sell to ourselves
some fake image of who we are?
It is a little confusing to say the least.
So we were lucky enough to see out the year in a family-run Irish country
pub. In years to come that may well be a rarity.
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