The real Irish pub could be doomed to extinction

September 2020

There's a little pub on the quay front in Wexford town, called the John Barry. The building looks like it is a least a couple of hundred years old, and the type of place where the customers often might be of the same vintage. "Old man pubs", some call them, quite respectfully, of the senior citizens who frequent them, usually male, because they grew up in a period when a woman's place was in the home, or at most in the Lounge bar. Being Australian, I can relate to that.

However from the historic accounts on the web, it's a friendly, lively little pub with great stout and live music. Music and drink, the twin reasons for being of the Irish pub.

Well, the John Barry hasn't been open for six months now, and it bears the dreaded "No dine-in. Beer." tag. 

So do hundreds of pubs across the country, an estimated 7,000 of them (for a country of fewer than five million). The government allowed pubs which serve food to reopen on June 29, having been closed for over two months. But "wet pubs", which don't serve food, had to remain closed, the reasoning being something to do with heaving crowds breathing on each other at the bar counter.

Outsize character, TD and Kerry publican Danny Healy Rae spoke of the plight of what he called "the men on the hill". Quoted in The Irish Times, he said: “The more it goes on the less chance the men on the hill will ever meet inside in their local pub. Many of the pubs around the county of Kerry, many of them will not open again."

A photo one publican took of an elderly customer sitting alone, staring out a window, went viral online as it so neatly summed up the situation of many of these "men on the hill".

Now, early autumn, the government appears set to allow pubs to reopen on September 21, after the longest bar lockdown in Europe. But officialdom continues to make negative and disapproving noises about throwing the pub industry open again, and warning that if Covid-19 cases soar again, the doors to the saloon bar will be shuttered.

The Irish pub is so famous for its atmosphere that you can find facsimiles all over the world, from Melbourne to Székesfehérvár in Hungary (try saying that name after a few pints). I'm just hoping that all these innocent landlords and ladies across the nation can recover, financially and socially, from this protracted, and I believe unwarranted cessation of trading that was imposed upon them.

We really will have to get out there and learn to live with this coronavirus.

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