Little Dublins Everywhere
On Irish pubs and good stories
Owing largely to famine and unrest, Ireland’s greatest export has been its people. The Irish diaspora is 10 million strong with 100 million descendants. But perhaps its second greatest export has been its pubs.
Outside of Ireland, there are over 7,000 Irish pubs. They are nearly uniformly dark and welcoming, built from some combination of varnished wood and vinyl or leather seating, and must contain an array of stained glass windows, antique mirrors, and vintage photographs or artwork, flags, coats of arms, or Celtic symbols.
You can find an Irish pub nearly anywhere you may find yourself. I have battled altitude sickness while drinking Guinness at the Dubliner in La Paz, Bolivia, partied with a U2 cover band who never broke character at the Moby Dick in Uruguay, and nearly lost my mind at Paddy’s in Peru.
It was at Paddy’s that I discovered this quote (it’s printed on their menus) from Somerset Maugham and I came to understand the makeshift families and tribes that we form over a pint, a bourbon, or a margarita. The irony is not lost on me that I am quoting an English writer in a piece on Ireland. I plead only that Maugham was born in France to Irish parents and wrote often of Ireland. Mea Culpa.
I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history.
The desire to find a place where we belong is universal. Some lucky ones, find it at home. Some wander all their lives and try to go home again. The tension between alienation and nostalgia is the stuff of great literature.
Atavism is Maugham’s five-dollar word for things we are hard-wired to feel and do. Our primal urges. The restlessness of searching for a home we have never known is the bane of the traveler, the seeker, and maybe the drinker.
Ireland was set on fire in the 17th Century and it scattered the Irish across the world. They knew they may never go home again, particularly to a home they had never known. But they brought with them the lessons of the Irish pub.
Pubs are scale models of communities. If they were just venues for alcoholism, we could take them to the parks, and the halls of Congress. There would be little need to pay six dollars for a two-dollar beer. Every pub has a unique ecosystem, a hierarchical social structure, and its own etiquette. The best ones maintain a good balance between familial and transactional. You want to feel at home but not have to pull your own pint.
Pubs are also a place for stories. Storytelling defines Irish culture as much as it has redefined it. Everybody is a little full of shite in a pub. The fish was always a little bit bigger, the lover a little bit better looking and yours was just a little bit tougher than the other team. It doesn’t matter. There are no fact-checkers here. And there are no gains to be had for these misremembrences and sleight of hand. The goal is only joy - a respite from the real world outside the doors.
That is not to say that a pub is not the proper place for a conversation. You can distinguish a story from a conversation in that the storyteller does not need you to respond. Understandably, many fail at making the shift between the two. Free-flowing conversation is the reason you stay for the next pint. This requires listening, which requires a bit of empathy. Your empathy will wane with each successive pint - a primordial signal that you should return to the safety of the cave.
These stories and conversations must also be funny. I truly believe that humor is our greatest human value. Imagine what could be accomplished in the Middle East if they just let loose a little. It is nearly always true that unfunny people take themselves quite seriously and do not consider you much at all. You will find this is true with the leaders of nearly all “isms”. If you must bring your unfunny friend to the pub, he must play a supporting role in your humor. The pub is no place for literalism or activism - there is a reason there is no proliferation of German Pubs.
Now, I understand you may be a fan of mixology. That’s fine. Your desire for a seventeen-dollar vodka drink spiked with elderflower and a sprig of rosemary that’s been burnished on the belly of a siamese cat is your prerogative. Your palette, your choice. But the place for that is not here.
Stop embarrassing yourself, and more importantly us. Context is everything. While you’re at it, please refrain from staring at the bar shelves, hoping some liquor will speak to you. If you’re reading this it’s doubtful you just got your ID. You’ve been here before, act like it and order. This isn’t the meat department at Stater Brothers. The Irish pub values tradition. It is a temple to cultural heritage. It is a homage to the home most have never known.
Since we deal primarily with reading in this missive, let’s return to Irish literature in the mind-numbingly unreadable Ulysses - a book you probably have not read and you really shouldn’t. It’s a stream-of-consciousness retelling of Homer's Odyssey. The story takes place on a single day in Dublin, where characters scurry around the city, in essence searching for a home. In the middle of the story ” the main character, Leopold Bloom stops at https://davybyrnes.com/ for a gorgonzola cheese sandwich and a glass of burgundy while wandering through Dublin. The odyssey in the story is perhaps best summed up as follows: “Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.”