Operation Barnstorm and Why We Need to Hide The Barn House Pub from The USA.

When the war finally came and the sands around the city were raised by hellfire from above, Amani could hardly believe the calm that had washed over her. All through the previous weeks, nervous energy had clung to every street in the city like a foul smell from which there was no escape – she felt it intensely, thinking of little else as the men in suits on the other side of the world pondered her and her country’s fate. So, when the first troops arrived and the noise of the city’s traffic and its hurried inhabitants had given way to interludes of intense quiet which padded the thunderous cacophony of war, she couldn’t help but feel a conflicting sense of relief. Relief that, even though all had changed utterly, at least, for now, the waiting and the tension were over. 

Operation Barnstorm and Why We Need to Hide The Barn House Pub from The USA.

As the invasion advanced and Amani’s calm subsided, and she expected that it would soon become enveloped by fear. But as she watched and heard of events that unfolded, she instead had become stricken with anger. And not the prevailing shade of anger familiar to all, across the city, who heard it shrieked from the political leaders and the radical Imams, but an anger for those who had no regard for the sanctity of the artefacts of the past. She found herself incandescent with fury upon hearing of the looters. The selfish and the greedy – who took it upon themselves to pillage priceless relics from the nearby National Museum, while the city was on its knees. Equal, too, was her ire for those who just stood by and allowed them to do it.  

At that time and after it was apparent that forces belonging to her country and its invaders, did not share her views on the sanctity of the relics. Protection for millennia-old Mesopotamian remains or for pre-Islamic art was not evident. What was evident, however, was the interest that the invading forces had in protecting infrastructure and resources pertaining to the country’s oil industry. 

The above is a fictionalised account of an eyewitness report I read from someone who described their experience of the beginning of the Iraq war in 2003. And even though it was definitely a bit indulgent of me to open an article about a pub in Dublin with that, I’m happy enough that it’s at least a bit relevant. If even just tenuously so. For the second time, The Barn House, the last pub before The Grand Canal at Dolphin’s Barn, had me thinking about US Imperialism the other week. I had first tied the pub to the topic a year and a quarter or so ago upon the occasion of my first visit to the pub. 

You know the way they say that smell is the sense that most easily triggers our memories? Well, I can attest to that being true because the main abiding memory that I have of The Barn House is of the pungent smell of kerosene. It was early in the year and a crowd of us were crawling toward Rialto. We all agreed that we could smell it, diesel or petrol we thought. Pintman №11 and his qualification as a mechanic of many years allowed us to dismiss these guesses and collectively agree on kerosene. So potent was the smell at the time, that one of us joked that it was just as well the Yanks didn’t know about this place, or else they’d be in looking for WMDs and ready to liberate us from an authoritarian dictator. There was even a readymade, media-friendly name for the offensive; Operation Barnstorm would look great in the papers, we all agreed. 

That conversation, a mere footnote in the day, a throwaway joke at the time, would come to gain new importance in the year that followed. Not personally having thought of that canalside pub for quite a while, or the jokes we made, therein, you can imagine how quickly it all came flooding back when, as I doom-scrolled through Twitter, I came to happen upon a picture of Chief Yank in charge himself: President of the United States of America – Joe Biden. It was during the time that Joe was on his official visit to the island and here he was, happily rolling along through Dolphin’s Barn on his way up to the Áras, or wherever, in his bulletproof limo. And in the background, none other than that kerosene-rich hostelry: The Barn House. Just as well he’s looking out the other side and that that thing is hermetically sealed, I thought to myself.

Thankfully Joe didn’t take any notice of The Barn House on this occasion, so he’d be no use to anyone who’s reading this to find out what the pub is like. So I suppose that’s where we step in. I’d be lying if I were to say that we got a great sense of the place during that first and only visit. Other than the smell of home heating fuel, there weren’t too many features that stood out. TVs aplenty and a few betting machines were noted. Dark carpet added to the overall dimness of the place.

Joe Barnstorm

We agreed that it was a local’s local. and it had plenty of youngfellas who were comfortable enough there to roar the house down as they watched Man Utd playing some inconsequential league tie.The staff were very accommodating and the pint was more than acceptable too (€5, early 2022).  But we would be lying if we said we didn’t enjoy Lowe’s before, and The Bird Flanagan after, more than we did the Barn. 

My thanks to all of you who’ve stayed with us to the end of this and my apologies to anyone who waded through all of it just to get some sparse information on The Barn House. And if you’re ever in the environs of Dolphin’s Barn and see the Chinooks and Black Hawk Helicopters coming across the horizon – you know the score! Grab your go-bag and head for your bugout shelter.  

Smells, Slang & Stout; Why The Malt House is a Working Class Davy Byrne’s

Each and every June, they don their straw boaters and bedeck themselves in their finest Edwardian splendour. By foot, bicycle, and horse-drawn cart, they can be seen as they to and fro around that familiar circuit. They’ll be spotted alongside the fortifications of Sandycove, and they’ll be seen at the mouth of Westland Row. They’ll be seen on Stephen’s Green and in Merrion Square. You’ll undoubtedly see them out on the pavement of Duke Street as they quaff overpriced burgundy for to dull the sharp sting of the similarly overpriced gorgonzola that has just passed their lips. But one place you will almost certainly not see them is at Number 27 James’ Street. And for the life of me, I cannot begin to fathom why. 

I’m not sure if it’s just me. Still, every time that Bloomsday – a day I’ve heard referred to as Paddy’s Day for arseholes on more than one occasion – rolls around, I find myself a bit annoyed that all of the reportage from that day invariably centres around those familiar and picturesque vistas mentioned above.

I’m not trying to sound bitter, but having, as Joyce did too, a bit of a persecution complex, I’m always a bit annoyed that we rarely see images from the more working-class areas featured in Joyce’s writing. Areas like James’ Street and pubs like The Malt. 

The Malt House

It’s unlikely you’ll find it mentioned in the literature that litters the lobbies of hotels around the country – but The Malt is a pub that features in that novel which has been called the most prominent landmark in modernist literature – Ulysses. Specifically, it appears in the Wandering Rocks episode where the reader follows Tom Kernan, a tea merchant, as he passes Crimmins’ Wine and Spirit Merchants at numbers 27 and 28 James’s Street – The Malt is the business that now occupies number 27. 

From the sundial towards James’s gate walked Mr Kernan, pleased with the order he had booked for Pulbrook Robertson, boldly along James’s street, past Shackleton’s offices. Got round him all right. How do you do, Mr Crimmins? First rate, sir. I was afraid you might be up in your other establishment in Pimlico. How are things going? Just keeping alive. Lovely weather we’re having. Yes, indeed. Good for the country. Those farmers are always grumbling. I’ll just take a thimbleful of your best gin, Mr Crimmins. A small gin, sir. Yes, sir. 

James Joyce, Ulysses

Long-time readers of the blog might be aware that our framing of a pub, relative to its minor inclusion in the works of Joyce has almost become a bit of a DublinBuPub trope at this stage. Knowing this, I initially sought to write this one without any such mention. But the more I tried, the harder it seemed to become. I just couldn’t escape the thought that a place like The Malt House – it being so brimming with working-class Dubliners, all at ease with themselves and others, in full flow of their peculiar Hiberno-English is precisely the sort of space that Joyce himself would have feasted upon for his own particular literary peculiarities. 

We would ask all readers of this piece, who seek to gain a rounded view of this pub to first allow our presence in four pubs immediately before the visit we are going to speak about here, to act as the disclaimer that it should. We will note that the pub had, during the course of that afternoon, come to be highly recommended when Pintman №9, an employee of a nearby manufacturing concern, the one that actually possesses a literal malt house, had set our jowls watering in anticipation when he spoke of the quality of the local brew that he had enjoyed there some months previous.

For fear that we’re going to lean toward another of our tropes, we won’t comment on what we really think about this. But, the first thing you should note about The Malt House is the fact that food is served. If the management in The Malt House wants to impress upon you: the customer, or you: the passerby, or you: the general member of the public – it is that they serve food.

test frame

The Sundial Mentioned in the quote above

And just like the commercial malt houses in the nearby expansive brewery, whose roasting of barley regularly engages the olfaction of the wider Dublin 8 postcode, en-masse, this particular malt house also happens to do so as well. Not with barley though, but with that aforementioned food offering. The patrons of this malt house are free to inhale the fragrance of their fellow customer’s dinners, as they emanate from the kitchen in the pub’s rear. And given that any Joycean worth their salt will waste no time quoting about sweet lemony wax, tang of faintly scented urine and, eh, Nora Barnacle’s… essence –  we’d have to make, once again, an argument for its inclusion as a Joycean touchstone. 

In the short time that we do spend in The Malt House, we find ourselves in conversation with two welcoming lads who waste no time in rearranging their table to make room for the heft us that have arrived and opted to sit at the table next to them. In the same spirit of nearby hostelries, they waste no time throwing a bit of slagging our way when they realise that we’re from the far side of the city. One of them is quick enough to enquire with regard to our League of Ireland allegiances – “Yis aren’t bleedin’ Bohs fans now are yis?” We manage to assuage any tension with a tenuous allegiance to St Pat’s by qualification of one of us having Inchicore parentage. 

And that is about all we can really report from our maiden voyage to The Malt House. It’s a straightforward pub. A St. Pat’s Pub. A Dublin GAA Pub. A pub with plenty of friendly and welcoming patrons. A pub with a great pint (€5 as of Late 2022). It’s a pub that this blog might, had it been writing about it just three of four years previously, have described as being typical of the area. But with the demise of Bakers, The Clock and Agnes Browne’s, The Malt House has lived to see itself start to become the exception, rather than the rule. So, regardless of whether this pub is just a common or garden local or a Joycean relic, or both, for all that is good and holy, be sure to get in and experience a good honest Liberties local while you still can.  

Two Pints and a Short Back and Sides: Trying to Define The Bottle Boy

When boyhood’s fire was in my blood, you’d often find me – huddled with the rest outside the hall. Them all with their extra bags and tracksuit bottoms; and me, with no such additional accoutrements other than a note which had been begged from one of my reluctant parents the night prior. A note that would exclude me from the next double class of physical education.

The Bottle Boy: North Wall Quay


For back then, I was part of that underappreciated and misunderstood troupe of schoolchildren who resisted our school’s insistence that we go run and jump for up to 60 minutes at a time. Our reasons for such resistance were many and varied – but one of mine related to a particular disdain I had toward a particular type of exercise – arguably the most archetypal exercise of all: the press-up. Be it red-faced, so-called educators shouting for five more, or factions of classmates performatively executing them in a furore of hormone-fuelled competitiveness, press-ups always seemed to activate some sort of deep-set, multi-generational terror in me. And I was want to avoid them at all costs. 
 
Thankfully, though, nothing in this world lasts forever. And eventually, The Leaving Cert was sat and Ewan McColl’s words about schooldays were ringing true – and with no plans for a career in the defence forces or the fitness industry, I could be reasonably satisfied that the days in which I could be threatened by press-ups were well and truly over. Right? Well… no! Decades have passed since your humble narrator was dodging PE classes and all these years later, he has found himself battling, once again, against press-ups. But not as we had known them. 
 
It was in the fallout period from the global recession at the outset of the 21st century, that Dubliners began to notice things and to ask questions about places they were drinking, eating, or staying in. Questions like – Have I been to this pub before? Did I not have this exact same breakfast in the other place we were in? Is this not very similar to that other hotel I was in? And then eventually, the dots would have been joined and someone would say those two words. Those two doom-laden words… Press. Up. 
 
Yes. No longer associated with masochistic physical educators, the words press and up now have entirely different but equally terrifying connotations for the Irish pub-going public. Describing themselves as an Entertainment Company, Press Up is a chain of hospitality businesses. Having grown substantially over the last decade, PressUp now boasts a considerable and ever-growing portfolio of identikit pubs, hotels, and restaurants and, as you might have guessed – The Bottle Boy is yet another jewel upon the ever-shinier PressUp crown. 
 
It might have been entirely appropriate that I should call back to school-going times at the start of this piece because The Bottle Boy is a bit like you might have been back in school – devoid of any clue about what you were actually going to do in the world. Is it a restaurant? A local pub? A hotel bar? A cocktail joint? A Barbers? Why, it’s all these things and more. Previously Valence & McGraths, The Bottle Boy boast the honour of being the last public house on the eastern end of the north quays. The pub forms part of the newly developed Mayson Hotel, which towers above it. 
 
Entering from the street, the pub is pleasing to the eye. Timber-heavy and somewhat threadbare – it uses worn and undertreated wood as a dominant feature. The bar, itself, which runs along the right is somewhat Victorian in style, containing three large mirrors. Generic old-timey pub bric-a-brac and curios fill idle shelve space where needed. A snug-like section sits attached to the street-side end of the bar but owing to it having only the timber shell of a would-be partition and no door, it could be argued that it’s not a real snug, in the truest sense of the word.

It was all a bit sensory overload when first we visited the pub. It had an after-work crew, nestled into a corner, skulling pints and generally having a laugh. It had a couple of girlies who were glammed up to the nines and waiting for a few cocktails to come their way. It also had a few couples having three-course dinners. The barman, much to my disapproval at that time, would stop pouring drinks just so that he could greet people coming through the door in the way a Maître d’ in an American restaurant might – noisy and fake. It was hard to figure out exactly what this pub wanted to be. And that was before we even found out what was down the back of the place.  
 
Toward the back of the bar, there is a fire replete with cushioned surround giving congruence to the aesthetic set out in the previous parts of the pub. But, take a few steps more from here and all harmony begins to dissipate. It’s here that you’ll come to be in a larger expanse that opens to a courtyard. Where everything begins to feel more hotel than pub. To the right, beyond these few steps, there is a full barber shop behind a large viewing window – so that all your buddies have ample space to videotape you, as you pay a stranger €25 to give you a mullet, having drank eight to thirteen pints. And just as we mention pints, the Guinness here was in keeping with the standard usually experienced in the various PressUp pubs – more than acceptable, though not outstanding.

We’re forever ending the pieces we write on PressUp pubs on these philosophical open-ended, rhetorical questions – but they are always where we wind up when we speak about PressUp. Why can’t we speak about The Bottle Boy in the same positive fashion that we might regard the likes of The Ferryman with? After all, it’s not a bad pub. It’s definitely better to have it there than it is to have the derelict shell it was there instead.  
 
Is it a thing that our doe-eyed view of the past, when more pubs were family-run operations and our pining for such is just naïve? Are PressUp not just a modern incarnation of the Mooneys, and are we not just being cynical to be so dismissive of them? We attended a wedding in the hotel since our initial visits, and as a result of that we spent a good chunk of a day in that pub – we think of it fondly since then. And it was far better spending a day in there than it was in some plush ballroom out in County Meath. So maybe we’re just nitpicking. Maybe we should be glad that it’s an Irish outfit breathing new leases of life into these old derelict pubs and not the other shower from across the water? 

But I just don’t know. Ironically, in the way that some the very great pubs of this city seem to have some unknown quantity that makes them so, these pubs seem to also have an unknown quantity in the inverse. One that prevents them from being so. And with PressUp most recently having jettisoned Dollard & Co. – their go at a Fallon & Byrne style offering on Wellington Quay – opting to kit it out as a pub and rename it The Giddy Dolphin, it seems to us that the great PressUp debate is only really beginning. 


 

A Tale of Two Visits: Discovering Leonard’s Corner under Abnormal Circumstances

Looking back on it now, with the gift of hindsight, and decent software that chronologically catalogued all the photos from the year, I can see that we were fitting a lot into that summer.  

Leonard’s Corner

Big weekends like the one in question weren’t as abnormal as they’ve admittedly become. The body and the circumstances were better equipped for an action-packed Thursday to Sunday extravaganza with a full itinerary of very late finishes. It was at the tail end of one of these glorious weekends that I would first cross the threshold of Leonard’s Corner.   

It was a Sunday, nay – it was the Sunday. World Cup Final Sunday, and we were away to deepest darkest South Dublin to watch the fixture in a friend’s house. Yours truly was barely upright and still contending with the Charlie’s that had been consumed when the sun had already started to come up, a mere couple of hours prior.   

Having marginally survived the journey across the city, I located the nearest licensed outlet and immediately realized that, alike the 11 Croatians that were to be shortly lining out against France in Moscow, I was going to have to play this one tactically. 

Cans of stout would not be on the bill of fare for that afternoon. Nor was lager or any other such widely available beer that was for sale in the supermarket I’d found myself in. I had almost settled on cider, when, for some reason at that particular moment, it was obvious that several different variants of cheap sparkling wine were the necessary tonic required for reviving my ailing soul.  

A couple of hours later and things had improved exponentially. Now cured about three times over and with a few quid of French Sweepstakes money in the back pocket, I found myself in tow with some friends as we crawled our way out of Harold’s Cross and towards Clanbrassil Street. Naturally, it wasn’t long before we arrive at Leonard’s Corner.  

Leonard’s Corner, situated on… Leonard’s Corner is one of a unique set of intersections in Dublin that derive their name from a business that was once (or may still be) situated there. Though its name is in harmony with the name of the intersection now, the pub did go through a few different names in its past, previously bearing the name Carrs.

It seems that the original Leonard was a Mr Francis Leonard, who owned the building in the latter half of the 19th Century. And even though this 1894 edition of The Belfast Newsletter shows that he put it up for sale in that same year, the intersection still bears his name more than a century later.

Leonard’s Corner, the pub that is, is a traditional looking pub; L-shaped, due to the placement of the bar and its being on a corner, we found it somewhat dimly lit to an agreeable level on this first visit. On that occasion, having ordered a round and happily sat down at one of the low tables, we – being a bit boisterous with the day that was in it- found ourselves on the bad side of one of the barmen.  

Were we merry from the day? Yes.  

Were we of any harm to others? Absolutely not.  

Were we too loud? Almost definitely.

Leonard's Corner Full2

By pint number two, that barman had asked us to quieten down a few times. And in lieu of pint number three, we decided that we probably were ruining the ambience and opted to leave. 

When I next set foot in Leonard’s Corner, it was on the occasion of wanting a few pints prior to a Mary Wallopers show in the nearby National Stadium. To those unaware, The Mary Wallopers are what I would term a sort of nouveau Clancy Brothers – rollicking balladeers from Dundalk who have a fanbase as thirsty as their repertoire of liquor-laden folksongs. Unfortunately, for our friends in Leonard’s Corner, they were aware of none of this – the Mary Wallopers, their fans, or their concert didn’t exist as far as they were concerned. That is until they did. 

I’m sorry to say that I’m capable of being a petty, petty man. And I know this because of the sense of satisfaction I found in watching that same said barman – the one that had been so vexed with us those four years prior – as he battled against the unexpected hordes, five deep – on the far side of the bar that he tended. I’m sorry to tell you, reader, that I couldn’t shift that feeling of cosmic equilibrium as I gazed into the eyes of that man and saw that he was like a fox in the headlights, timidly asking another customer – ‘what time do them doors open up there’.  

I keep telling people to enjoy bartenders like this while they last, though. The old-school career bartender is becoming a rarer thing in the modern world. This man and his colleagues excelled themselves on that particular night – professionalism defined. They got everyone served in good time and dealt with a swell that would have engulfed the less experienced. And of course, the man was right and proper to throw us a bit of ire on that Sunday in 2018, we’d expect no less from the bartenders in our own local, were a messy group of outsiders to descend upon it on a relaxing Sunday night.  

I suppose we’ve only proven, in writing about our only two visits to Leonard’s, that we’ve never actually been there under normal circumstances. So, we’re definitely not the best arbiters of what it’s actually really like on a day-to-day basis. Then again, maybe we are – those two visits told us everything we need to know about the place and that is that it’s in great hands. I definitely have a grá for the place as a result of those two visits – and I can’t wait to get back there again.  

The Clamper, The Angle Grinder and The Regular: A Visit to Lowe’s in Dolphin’s Barn

A clamper, a man with a battery-powered angle grinder and a recently clamped motorist all walk into a bar…  

Fear not, reader – this isn’t the first line of a poorly constructed joke – this is the scene which presented itself to me upon arrival at Lowe’s in Dolphin’s Barn on an afternoon, earlier in the year. But let me come back to that a little bit later on. 

The Clamper, The Angle Grinder and The Regular: A Visit to Lowe’s in Dolphin’s Barn

Lowes, along with its neighbouring pubs, are ones that have evaded the clutches of DublinByPub for quite a spell. We certainly hadn’t been actively avoiding Cork Street and Dolphin’s Barn – this just wound up being a thoroughfare we never managed to make it past The Liberties to. But with the pubs open anew in the early part of this year we set a course to tackle the street once and for all. And of the three pubs along that particular stretch, Lowe’s is the best by a country mile.  

A one-room pub, narrowing at the back, Lowe’s has a traditional décor. With plain brown carpet underfoot, it contains all its low seating to the front of the pub in the guise of couches and low stools. Containing the pub’s medium-sized bar, the rear of the space contains the majority of the pub’s high stools. A side entrance to the pub brightens the pub decently during the day leaving us to deem the place to have been in good nick upon our first visit. 

On that first visit, I had mentioned to my fellow drinkers that Lowe’s had something of a unique trait, relative to the Dublin pub landscape. I had been saying that though there are many pubs in Dublin which boast the name of a historic pub which once was located elsewhere in the city – Lowe’s is one of few pubs which actually is a pub that was once located somewhere else in the city.  

Having a direct lineage from the Lowe’s, which once stood on Dean Street, and constituted one of the Four Corners of Hell before its demise in the late 80s, The Lowe’s name has adorned the façade of this Dolphin’s Barn premises since the early 90s and is one of that interesting subsection of Dublin pubs that have moved location and are operated under the same name and by the same owner, or at least the descendants of the same owner. 

Our visits to Lowe’s would suggest that it’s a well-run pub. We found ourselves greeted warmly on each visit and found the drink to be in very good order, too. Coming in at €5.20 (Mid-2022), there wasn’t too much moaning to be done about price either. 

But there was plenty of moaning to be done about price by a man who was evidently a regular after he arrived into the pub one evening. Not that of the pint, though. From what I gathered – this fella worked nearby and was after having his car clamped. Sitting up at the bar and relaying his woes to the barman and all within earshot, he’d come to discover that he was sat between a clamper and a builder who happened to have, in his possession – a battery-powered angle grinder. Having been fully briefed on the legal workarounds by the man in the know (“they won’t give a shite… unless you’re a repeat offender..A code black they call it – happens all the time”), he left with the angle grinder and returned smiling ear to ear. He stood his two advisors a few pints and drove off into the evening. 

Lowe’s is a fine pub and well worth a visit, just leave the car at home if you end up going there. 

A Code Black (File Photo)

DublinByPub does not condone or recommend the removal of clamps by any means other than those advised by the relevant authorities.

Edit: we were entirely incorrect in what we said about the pub moving location, above. While we’re still certain it is connected to the Lowe’s which once constituted the Four Corners of Hell, the Dolphin’s Barn outfit has stood there for far longer than we had thought – since the 60s it would seem. Meaning it would have run concurrently with its namesake down on Dean Street. Many thanks to the commenters who set us right here. Must stop taking stories told to me in pubs as fact. Prior to Lowe’s, the pub was previously called Hunt’s. Hunts went for auction in 62.

Hunts for Auction

Harkin’s – The Harbour Bar: Grand Canal Place

I was thinking about canals the other week. Not just in general – I had Dublin’s two canals – The Royal on the Northside and the Grand on the Southside on my mind. Now I’m not here to delve into the wider history of them, today, but that’s well worth looking into if you’re so inclined. But the canals are often, relative to this blog, foremost in our thoughts. Like so many, we use them as boundaries – deeming them to denote where the city centre of Dublin starts and ends. But, as I sat down beside Patrick Kavanagh on my lunch break during the week – I was thinking too, how their initial purpose, to be used for trade and commerce, is virtually eradicated now.  

Harkin’s – The Harbour Bar: Grand Canal Place

I was asking Paddy, whether he reckoned that his Canal Bank Walk poem might have been the thing that done it or at least heralded it. This change of the canal zeitgeist, as it were, to its modern form. The transformation of our consideration of this body of water to be a source of ecology, of nature and biodiversity and not solely a for-profit feat of engineering. 

Paddy, being a bronze statue, naturally did not respond to me. But I’ll post his poem here, which – as you’ll observe, makes no mention of industry or logistics. 

Canal Bank Walk 

Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal 

Pouring redemption for me, that I do 

The will of God, wallow in the habitual, the banal, 

Grow with nature again as before I grew. 

The bright stick trapped, the breeze adding a third 

Party to the couple kissing on an old seat, 

And a bird gathering materials for the nest for the Word 

Eloquently new and abandoned to its delirious beat. 

O unworn world enrapture me, encapture me in a web 

Of fabulous grass and eternal voices by a beech, 

Feed the gaping need of my senses, give me ad lib 

To pray unselfconsciously with overflowing speech 

For this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven 

From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven. 

Patrick Kavanagh

Now it’s probably bad enough to be reading this if you’re Brendan Behan – because after me just mentioning one of his most vocal adversaries, I’m now going to move on to speak about the pub he was in when he collapsed and ultimately died in 1964.  

Harkin’s, aka the Harbour Bar, is a pub situated on Grand Canal Place. And it could be argued that the pub and the street that it sits on are in direct defiance of the entire point that I made about the canals, above. Because, as one walks up Grand Canal Place, they might begin to notice that despite its name, there isn’t sight nor sound of the grand canal to be found anywhere. And if that leads you, as it did me, to curiosity – you won’t be long finding out that – just like outside The Lower Deck, there once was a Canal Harbour in situ near this pub. And this explains it retaining the name The Harbour Bar. And then you’ll look up at the grand vista of the Guinness Brewery and you’ll be very much reminded of the canal’s purpose as an artery of business and not a leafy lover-filled habitat. 

048 The Harbour Lights, Echlin Street (1977)

Harkin’s, being so close to the historic harbour, and being the last standing of such harbourside pubs in this environs, now finds itself with the distinction of being the pub closest to The Guinness Storehouse. On the smaller side of the city’s public houses, it’s a one-room pub which exudes an intimate, cosy sort of charm about it. Being so close to one of the city’s biggest tourist attractions, the staff have clearly had plenty of opportunities to work on their customer service given the warmth of the welcome we seem to always receive in the place. And it’s a good genuine warmth too, as opposed to the brand of Mid Atlantic faux-niceness you might get in other establishments.  

Crowd-wise, it’s no surprise to say that the pub is not shy of tourists, but it also has locals aplenty and retains the feel of a proper Liberties boozer. There’s good craic to be had in the place. When last we darkened its door, we were delighted to bump into Mark, a local historian, who had us more than entertained talking about the history of our locality and sharing some old photos of it that he had on his phone. The barmen, however, on hearing we were from the Northside of the city, wasted no time in giving us a bit of stick – all being ardent Southsiders, themselves. (Check out Mark’s pages here and here) 

Regarding the pint, you’d be imagining that the quality would be up to scratch – being so close to the mothership. And you’d be entirely correct in imagining as such. Pintman №2, №3, №9 and I, on the occasion of our last visit there, decided that the quality of the jar and its €4.90 pricetag (Late 2022) warranted us staying for two more pints than we had initially intended to.  

There isn’t not much to be said about the pub regarding décor, function trumps form here and we’re not looking at anything too ornate. Our abiding memory of all of the structural elements of the building was the relatively long corridor that runs down to the gents. I had remarked to Pintman №2 that it struck me as the type of thing you see before you emerge out to the crowd in the mid-nineties tv show, Stars in Their Eyes. He preferred to liken it to the tunnel in Anfield.  

As we alluded to earlier in the post, it’s a fact that this was the last Public House Brendan Behan ever took a drink in before his body succumbed to years of alcohol abuse. While not exactly a great omen – and morbid and all as it is to go there, I’d have to say that even though I’d have plenty of places further up in the queue for where I’d like to take my last pint, I wouldn’t be disappointed if it had to be Harkin’s in the end.  

Noctor’s: Sheriff Street Lower

Coming toward the latter end of 2021, we’d had it fully planned and spec’ed out for a good while. It had been a slack year for the cause with all concerned in the DublinByPub ranks – assorted big life changes and a worldwide pandemic had given time its relished advantage to get between us. So when the opportunity to get the band back together and collectively hit a few city-centre pubs presented itself to us, we knew we had to make it count. It had to be one of our most wanted. It had to be Noctor’s.

Noctor’s: Sheriff Street Lower

There was to be a half-day, a preferred route, and a plan b, we may have even discussed wardrobe at one stage. But in the end, pints, just like they always do, would make light work of all these well-honed plans, leaving a half-drunk troupe of us bundling up Sheriff Street under the cloak of darkness, a few weeks out from Christmas.

Now let us, at the very outset, state that we have no interest in perpetuating the rough and ready classification that we’ve often heard attributed to Sheriff St. But with that said, we’re not looking to paint this part of Dublin 1 as some sleepy, oak-lined friendly avenue, either. We are but mere impressionable suburbanites. Suburbanites who exist and communicate, more than many, in that pub-talk realm of lore and hyperbole – and it’s in these spheres, exclusively, where we hear mention of, and talk of Noctor’s. And when this particular public house is up for discussion, the sentiment is never positive. It’s always tales and warnings of how “you’d take your life in your hands going up there” and that “you’d do well to keep away from that mad kip”, and so on, and so forth.

So with these warnings and tales of woe, alongside other nuggets like the supposed fact that Jim Sheridan brought rapper, 50 Cent here one time, making our existing curiosity curiouser, it’s not long before we’re stepping through the adjoining financial district and making haste toward Sherriff Street. We may be, outwardly, acting like we’ve not heeded any of those cautions, but a spike of adrenaline, internally, is telling an altogether different tale.

When we shortly find ourselves turned onto the fabled street, the initial reaction is one of disappointment. An absence of a glowing façade, or assortment of smokers, all compounded by a closed set of shutters, leads us to initially believe that the pub is closed and that our journey has been a pointless one. Pintman №2, not being one to waste valuable drinking time, immediately sets course to return the way we came – only to look back and realise, just like in some terrible slasher-flick, that he’s completely alone on the dark street. Heading back towards the pub, he realises, just as we had, that, despite the unopened shutters, the pub is actually open. Immediately, he enters to find us standing at the bar on the receiving end of what can only be described as an interrogation at the hands of the barman and a few of the locals sitting around him. Questioning is carried out in the form of:

Where are yous from?

What are yis doing here?

Who told yous about here?

Insisting that we’re only here for a few pints, as the rest of us mumble incoherently in not-so-stoic agreement, Pintman №3’s retort is met with steely silence before the barman declares, in response, that he hasn’t decided if he’s going to serve us yet. At this point, things go sad-funeral quiet as the staff and the locals continue in their inspection of us. And just as we consider letting go of our last collective nerve and bailing, the bar erupts in laughter.

Yizzer alright lads!

What do yis want?

Sit down there and I’ll bring them over.

By the time we’re about to sit down, we’ve acquired the attention of a fair few of the locals, most of whom engage us in conversation. Pintman №3, in a manner befitting an affable 1950s Fianna Failer, makes no qualms about joining a sizeable table of habitués and chats away with them about one of the locals playing over the speakers – a Mr Luke Kelly. The rest of us, in turn, find a spot and chat across the divide with a woman who happens to be drinking a can of Tenants – an unusual sight in a Dublin Pub, we agree later.

As promised, pints are dispatched down to us in short enough time and we’re more than impressed with them. We note them as being of an incredibly high standard and the price to have been set at €4.50 a pour (Late 2021). A bargain, we agree, especially in the context of the comparatively inferior pints we had been drinking for 5.70 on Capel Street an hour prior.

Noctor's

Décor-wise, this is a pub where function certainly trumps form. That’s not to say that we haven’t drank in worse looking pubs (we have) but, suffice it to say that other licensed premises within the city might be more likely to end up in that Dublin 2023 calendar your Ma is going to get you for Christmas. The pub is, however, laid out well for its intended purpose – a dark wood, small to medium size bar stands on your right as you enter the pub. Banks of low seating take up the space on your left. And there’s a sizeable bank of floor space between the two. Curved arches at the far end of the seating space denote the leisure section of the pub wherein stands a pool table and a dartboard. The colour scheme, overall, is bright – walls are painted in a beige/cream sort of tone and the flooring is a varnished, yet somewhat weathered light wood. Some dark wood in the seats and the tables and shelves add a little contrast.

Earlier in this post, we said that we wouldn’t paint Sheriff Street as a sleepy, oak-lined friendly avenue, as if such a thing was what a street should aspire to. But, in all reality, why would anyone want to aspire to such boredom. Not that you need us to tell you this, but Sheriff Street is an infinitely more interesting place than some leafy, embassy-saturated thoroughfare in Ballsbridge. And, let alone the scores of well-known and beloved Irish people in music and the arts of both today and yesterday that have come from here, this is also thanks, in no small part, to somewhere like Noctor’s. Its clientele is friendly like very few other city pubs’ are and it’s yet another pub that has taught us to take little heed of supposed notoriety.

Kavanagh’s: New St.

Verbose and all, as we’d like to be about every Dublin pub that we visit – sometimes there’s just no escaping the plain and the ordinary from our experiences. And not that we’d like to label Kavanagh’s of New Street as such, it just happens to be such a pub relative to all of our experiences there.

Kavanagh’s: New St.

Each time we’ve darkened the door of this particular hostelry, we must admit that it on the occasion of having left the big and the green, and admittedly enjoyable, bombast of its nearest competitor across the way, and we’d be naïve to think that this didn’t feed into our view of the place. So do take that as a disclaimer, if needed.

A medium-sized and well-maintained pub, it’s a rather bright space during the day and, as Pintman №2 would put it – a grand place to watch a match, though it must be disclosed that this is an attribute he affords to any space that has a visible television and a sky tv subscription.

A large bar sits to the left of the space as you walk in, and a stonework arch catches the eye at the back of the room. Leading out to the beer garden and the toilets – it was in the passageway beyond this arch that we found what we considered to be one of the more conversation-worthy features of the pub – a note that read “no drink to be brought out back after 7 pm, as neighbours are complaining”. Something we all agreed definitely threw a sort of passive-aggressive shade toward dwellers domiciled in the pub’s proximity.

Kavanagh's Sign

We had reason to recall the tone of this particular note during the pandemic when the pub hit the headlines for their defiance of Taoiseach – Micheál Martin’s pleas for pubs to refrain from selling takeaway pints, childishly referring to him as ‘Mehole’ their printed quote.

Thankfully, there wasn’t such juvenility evident in the pint pouring and pricing to be found when we visited. Pints were of acceptable standard and caused no considerable hurt for either wallet or the palate. There was no food about the place on the occasion of our well-dated visits, but even the quickest look at the pub’s social channels will tell you that this is something they’re really pushing lately. Suffice it to say that we don’t need to tell you how we feel about that.

But keeping pandemic-era politics and anti-carvery bias aside, we’d categorize this as a grand little pub. An unremarkable and inoffensive local shop. And God knows that they’re becoming a rarer and rarer gem these days.

Brewdog – Grand Canal

In the waning weeks of 2020, before everything turns to shite again, I find myself upon a bench amid inexplicable red plastic protrusions shooting from the ground in a manner as confusing as the tax affairs of some nearby headquartered multinationals. I am hungover and am sat like some sort of 21st century Kavanagh – begrudging people on e-scooters and segways, as they whir by in twos and threes.

I make a phone call to distract myself from the cold and am eventually joined by my better half, who, in true depressing, 2020 style has just come from a funeral. We’re here, amongst the jauntily-angled architecture, for to tick off one of Dublin’s most recently built public houses.

Brewdog

Hastily, in the end-of-year cold, we make toward the furthermost end of the southern quays, remarking, as we go, on the newness of the buildings and the emptiness of the streets. In short time, we come to an uber-industrial, faded-red steel-beam framed building; in Caledonian blue the sign above the entranceway reads: Brewdog.

To those unfamiliar, Brewdog is a Scottish brewery and pub chain which has been one of the defining entities in Craft Beer’s international boom toward the mainstream in this part of the world over the last decade and a half, or so. Having exponentially grown from humble beginnings, the company quickly became one of the UK’s largest independent breweries. In its lifetime, they’ve become known for their provocative marketing techniques and have ended up doing things as uncool as suing somebody for using the word ‘punk’. Recently they were implicated in a whistle-blower’s report which accused them of fostering a toxic and fearful culture within the company.

When we arrive inside the building, we land at an empty reception desk and, once there, wait about five minutes for someone to approach. We rumble through the formalities of the dreaded ‘new normal’ – the Covid protocols of the day – and are sat at a table on the ground floor, not far from some sort of indoor fire pit. Our server then hands us some menus for our perusal and reminds us of time limits that apply (under said- Covid guidelines) before promptly disappearing for fifteen precious minutes of our meagre allowance of drinking time.

In these fifteen minutes, we peer about the vast space like a couple of curious meerkats, only to be somewhat frustrated by the otherwise unoccupied staff who seem in no rush to take our order. As we observe one of them doing a literal dance for another, we decide that our efforts are in vain and decide to try and suss out the locals – a more difficult task than first imagined. We discern no obvious customer base at this time – the décor seems to request a young and trendy clientele, but instead, on this occasion, has pulled in a lot of middle-aged professional men and their laptops, a former Fine Gael TD amongst them, single-handedly robbing the place of any pretensions toward cool or hip it may have held, heretofore.

Eventually, we do get to order, and we order plenty. The beer, of course, is phenomenal. Having been to a Brewdog bar or two across the way – I’m happy to admit that the beer is always outstanding – in its quality, its variety, and its presentation. Dublin, thankfully, is no exception- there is even a pilot brew kit contained within the premises and, indeed some beer brewed in that very same set of equipment is to be found for sale in the pub. And while the quality of the fare is not up for comment, the price certainly is. This is a very, very expensive place to drink. A pint of their flagship beer – Punk IPA, comes in at a walletclenching €7.20 (Circa Late 2020). We theorise whether the pricing is just set to be in line with the salary of the nearby residents’ or an end to a means concerning the maintenance of such large premises. We settle on both, probably.

Concerning the building, the first thing to note is the size of it – it’s huge. Set out on two vast floors, it encompasses all sorts of different types of seating. Downstairs is afforded an abundance of light from its large open windows, while upstairs has porthole windows aplenty to look out as you play whatever game it is that is played on a glossy-polished table so long that it would put Vladimir Putin to shame. If you find that you’re not in a sporting sort of humour, and the weather is ok, you can head out to the considerable balcony/roof garden space, which enjoys views of the very last, or the very first of the waters of The Grand Canal.

Brewdog – Grand Canal

The design spec of the building is what you might call late-stage hipster industrial-chic. Unaffected concrete abounds with the requisite complement of exposed beam, cable tray and air duct. Curated street-art style murals are plentiful and instagramable neon signs are, of course, to be found. And I suppose plenty would call it an impressive looking sort of space, but when I walk around it, I can’t help but thinking to myself that such a large and faux-industrial space trying to convey its indie and punk vibe is oxymoronic in every sense. It’s the antithesis of indie and punk – it’s what Carroll’s Gift shop is to the 1798 Rebellion. It’s not punk, it’s aggressive capitalism wearing one of those cheap Ramones t-shirts that was almost certainly sewed together by an impoverished wage slave in deplorable working conditions, far, far away.

As someone who has drank in and enjoyed drinking in Brewdog bars abroad in the past, I really wanted to like this place. But I guess the reality of it on your doorstep just proved too much to handle. If it were more central to the city, I’d probably concede that I’d have ended up returning at some stage. But it’s so out of the way down there in silicon, low tax land that It’s unlikely I’ll be heading back to spend so much money anytime soon.

So, if you want good and expensive beer served in expansive ironically threadbare surroundings amidst tech bros, property developers and Fine Gaelers, by all means – head on down to Grand Canal Dock and fill your diamond-encrusted boots. But in the case that you’re looking for the real deal, The Thomas House is located at 86 Thomas Street.

The Lucky Duck

Once upon a springtime’s evening, myself, Pintman №2 and a handful of other drinkers had found ourselves wandering merry through the streets of the capital. We were undertaking that grandest of Irish Sunday traditions – bouncing from pub to pub in the late spring sunshine attempting to assuage that impending doom of Monday morning with craic and pints.

We had started in The Liberties and had found ourselves up that long and boozy boulevard which contains streets Wexford, Camden, George’s and Aungier. Our intention was to make slow headway back to The Northside when we came to The Lucky Duck – one of Dublin’s newest pubs at the time. It looked decent, and in a time when we hadn’t any notion of who PressUp were – it offered no preconceptions, either. So, we decided to drop in and check it out.

The Lucky Duck

Standing at the threshold of the pub, we were met with the one thing which singled it out from others – the addition of a bouncer on the door. A certain anomaly for a normal pub of a Sunday evening. Having been scrutinized by our craictoseintolerant friend, we just about made it into the pub and happily found ourselves, a pint or two later, acquainted with two middle-aged local women who took it upon themselves to enthral us – their willing audience, with tales of the pub in its former guise – The Aungier House, or The Danger House as it was known to them. We asked them whether that name was warranted back then, to which they replied – sometimes.


As mentioned prior, the pub is operated by the much-maligned PressUp group and was opened in 2018, ending a two-decade-old spell of dereliction. The opening of the pub also happened to render an algorithmically generated route which solved Leopold Bloom’s much-quoted puzzle (about crossing Dublin without passing a pub) null and void. Take that, computer nerds!


The interior of the pub is newly kitted in a similar Victorian style to some of its nearest competitors. It merges newly purpose-built elements alongside apparent repurposed ones and contains a medium-sized snug at its Aungier Street side. A copper-topped bar runs most of the length of the space completing the look. It’s a very good-looking bar, certainly the most attractive in the Pressup portfolio, in our opinion.


Another feature of the pub which you might notice as you walk down Upper Digges St. is the collection of Delft Houses, which adorn shelves in the window. Cian, over on EveryPubInDublin, has identified these as souvenirs which were distributed by Dutch airline – KLM. These are noteworthy, as they refer to the intended name of the pub – The Dutch Billy.


We’re not entirely sure why the pub is called The Lucky Duck. We toyed with the theory that it was probably a name that was chosen in keeping with the avian pond-dweller theme established by the nearby (and excellent) Swan pub. Or possibly that it could be connected to other Dublin hostelries containing the word Duck in their title – there being two: The Dalkey Duck and The Wild Duck. Neither of these theories would prove conclusive.


What we do know is that the pub was to be called The Dutch Billy under the assumption that the structure containing the pub was an original Dutch Billy (A Dutch Billy is a specific architectural style of house which was built in Ireland during the 17th and 18th centuries and was named after King William of Orange). Plans for this name were so far advanced that a web domain was registered and a sign painted. But given that the above assumption proved to be incorrect, the name was changed late in the game.


The pint, on this maiden occasion, was noted as being acceptable, though not exceptional. Price was not recorded at this time, though there was an outburst worthy of a warning from the bouncer when the price of the toasty was revealed to us. This price, while remembered as being somewhat outrageous at the time, was also not recorded. In the latter half of 2021, the Guinness is now recorded as having been well presented but leaving something to be desired and was priced at €5.80 per-pour – a far cry from the £1.70 previously charged in The Aungier House, as reported in The Evening Herald in 1995 which, further on in the edition, reports the price to be one of the lowest, if not the lowest, in the city.

aungier


I think we’d be happy to label this as our favourite of the pubs in PressUp’s arsenal. It would be easy to be cynical about The Lucky Duck, especially given its proximity to The Swan – one of the city’s most authentic versions of the sort of pub that The Lucky Duck seeks to emulate. But why would you want to be cynical – they’ve, admittedly, done a fantastic job with the space. They’ve replaced a dismal derelict shell with a beautiful pub. And yes, there is a bigger chat to be had around PressUp’s furthering monopolisation of the sector, but for now, how can any of us, especially in the context of contemporary dereliction discourse, argue with something as nice as The Lucky Duck?