by Bill Barich
In terms of pubs, Athy lives up to its reputation for quantity. On a hundred-yard stretch of William Street, I counted eight, and only one was for sale. (I noticed others later, but the damage was still minor compared to smaller villages.) You can attribute the glut to Athy’s history as a market town, once anchored in Heritage Square. If a farmer scored a substantial payday, he celebrated in the grand manner. “When they visit market towns to sell a cow or a horse, they never return home till they have drunk the price in Spanish wine . . . or Irish usquebagh, and this they have outslept two or three days drunkenness,” commented Fynes Moryson, an Elizabethan writer, who despised all things Irish except the whiskey.
In Moryson’s day, most farmers belonged to the ranks of the poor, and their lot had not improved by the pre-Famine era, when they were universally dependent on potatoes. The humble tuber, easy to grow in any soil and not labor-intensive, had routed most other crops, as we all know, but I’d been ignorant of the scale of the conquest. As early as 1780, Arthur Young, touring Kildare, found that a barrel of potatoes would last a family of six for only a week, averaging out to about seven pounds per person. Almost forty years later, a survey revealed a much higher rate of consumption. A typical farmer’s breakfast in Rathkeale consisted of five pounds of potatoes, milk, and sometimes a little herring, and he ate the same meal again for dinner in the afternoon.
One anomaly of the Athy pub scene, as Frank Taaffe mentions in Eye on Athy’s Past, is the number of pubs strategically located on the edge of town, so that “bona fide travelers” could drink at them after hours. To be bona fide, you had to travel in good faith for at least three miles from wherever you had stayed the night before, as measured by a road or a footpath. A publican was obliged to serve you regardless of the time—and apparently did so gladly. (J. M. Synge uses the bona fide gambit in The Playboy of the Western World, where the boozers all follow a long, complicated, three-plus-mile route to the shebeen.) The law, scrapped in 1953, forbade anyone from traveling strictly for refreshment, an unenforceable clause flouted with impunity after cars entered the picture. Brian O’Nolan, in the guise of Myles na gCopaleen, liked to say he’d driven himself to drink.
On Woodstock Street, I spotted Willie Doyle’s and looked in just as the clock struck noon, not yet ready for a pint and even put off by the idea after my sleepless night, but I represented a minority of one. Doyle’s has three little rooms, and each was as densely occupied as a hive, with the regulars already gearing up for a long afternoon of televised racing and the betting that goes with it. An old saw has it that the best location for a pub is next to a church; the second-best might be near a bookie joint, and here Doyle’s was truly blessed, with two shops across the street. All day the regulars would shuttle back and forth, inadvertently testing their sobriety as they dodged a steady barrage of cars and trucks to get down a wager.
In every town like Athy, there’s a pub (or six) such as Doyle’s, where the anguished curses of losers and the raucous bray of winners form the very fabric of a Saturday afternoon. The bookies thrive on the action, of course. They’re not devious types who operate from a dingy dive anymore. Instead, they’re often corporate titans, and their shops can be ritzy. Boylesports, where I placed a bet in advance on Swiss Cottage in the three o’clock race at Naas, another of Father Breen’s tips, was so bright and merry that the staff might have been handing out free twenty-euro bills. The fog of broken dreams that makes breathing difficult had yet to collect. The doomed gambler of yesteryear—unshaven, in a stained trenchcoat, trying to cash a rubber check—was nowhere to be seen.
Boylesports was even “child-friendly,” and I almost cuffed a toddler by accident, when he grabbed my calf while I checked the racing paper. In their nifty uniforms, the young women cashiers could be mistaken for the cabin crew on a plane, devoted to your safe arrival wherever on the mental map that might be. Should your bladder seize up during a race, there’s a TV over the urinals. If you lose a massive bet and develop a sudden case of Tourette’s syndrome, Boylesports probably has a medic on call to treat you. The shop’s only drawback is the absence of alcohol—hence, the beauty of Willie Doyle’s.
As comfortable as I might have been at Doyle’s, patiently explaining to the lads why I shouldn’t have listened to the Racing Priest after Swiss Cottage finished a well-beaten fifth, I fought off temptation and looked for a less hectic, more traditional pub instead. (To Father Breen’s credit, L’Antartique did win at Cheltenham.) I passed up the Nag’s Head and Clancy’s, Kane’s and Brian Smith’s, all decent but undistinguished, and circled Ann’s Place, where a tortoise crawled across the façade of the pub with a pint balanced on its shell. “Have a Guinness when you’re tired!” ran the slogan beneath it, advice I almost took until I noticed O’Brien on Heritage Square, a strikingly handsome spot that also billed itself as a grocery.
The shopfront was a work of art, with paint so fresh and unmarked it could have been touched up the day before. Twin ionic columns, bright red, supported a broad green bannerlike beam on which the name O’Brien was written in Gaelic script. Big windows on either side of the door were trimmed in the same red, and each had three panes. At the top of each pane was a single word, and when combined they read Sweet Athy forever. (Sweet Athy figures in the lyrics to the folk songs “Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye” and “We’re On the Road to Sweet Athy.”) Though the windows were as clean as could be, you couldn’t see through them because of the cartons of Tayto chips and other dry goods stacked up behind them, almost to the ceiling.
Many pubs rely on their history as a grocery as a come on, but few still actually trade. E.J. Morrissey’s in Abbeyleix, a Midlands town in County Laois, has walls covered with old, or old-appearing, tin ads for beer, tobacco, and such, and shelves laden with antique cereal boxes and canned food, but they’re all just for show, as is the fellow in a white, knee-length shop assistant’s coat, who circled around when I was there, as if waiting to fill an order. Nothing at O’Brien’s is staged, however. Once you go through the door and step past the cartons, you’re at a front counter stocked with essentials—tea, butter, eggs, whiskey, all the items a family might have bought a century ago, with the exception of the top-ups for cell phones, the new bestseller.
The pub was at the back of the shop, through a doorway. Frank O’Brien sat there on a stool behind the bar, all alone, sipping a cup of tea and eating Pringles. He belonged to Pat O’Connor’s peer group, in terms of his age. (The key to longevity, I’d decided, is to be a publican, as long as you’re careful not to dip into the merchandise.) Taller and slimmer, he had a vaguely academic air, that attitude of mild abstraction suggestive of an intellectual dreaminess. As men of his generation do, he wore a tie, a V-neck sweater, and a sportcoat, and probably would have felt naked without them. To keep himself company, he’d been watching Superbrainiac on the tube, although not closely enough to register how loud the volume was, but my presence alerted him to the din, and he hit the clicker to reduce it.
I praised the design of the shopfront and remarked on the pub’s antiquity. The O’Briens have owned it since 1875, but it may be older, and Frank nodded pleasantly, too polite to say he’d heard it all before. I commented next on the glory of the day, once again bathed in radiant sunshine, and how pretty the Barrow looked to an angler. It rises in the Slieve Bloom Mountains of Laois and runs for about 120 miles to the sea, with a towpath along it where horses once pulled barges, some loaded with malted barley. Though coarse fish are its specialty, it also holds some trout, but Frank didn’t think I’d hook many in Athy because of the poor water quality. “The Lordly Barrow,” he said.
“The Lordly Barrow?” I repeated, a little baffled.
“Was that Spenser, or the other fella? The one with the pilgrims?”
I began to catch his drift. “Chaucer?”
“That’s right, Chaucer. ‘The Lordly Barrow’—I don’t know which one wrote it. No memory, gone for poetry and that now.”
This could be true, but Frank doesn�
��t miss a beat otherwise. He collects books, in fact, and had attended a launch earlier that month for an illustrated one about the bridges on the Barrow. He showed me a copy, suitably inscribed by the author. He has a small library in the pub, and refers to it to settle disputes among his customers, mostly over sports trivia. (Hurling is Athy’s obsession, and the fans debate its fine points heatedly.) Two young “fellas” had stopped at O’Brien’s some weeks ago, Frank recalled, while they were hiking the towpath by the river—it’s known as the Barrow Way—and they wondered why any publican would have so many books on hand.
“They’re for lads like you that asks me questions,” he told them, a direct enough answer.
“You must do a lot of reading,” I said.
“A lot of skimming. Ah sure, you wouldn’t have time to read, would you?”
Two girls interrupted our talk. They came in and stood by the front counter, and Frank got up and sold them some candy. He made a dozen sales over the next hour, courteous and unflappable, and also curious who the shopper might be, since he couldn’t see the counter clearly from his stool. It was a sort of game he played, I thought, and through a tally of the purchases, he could tell you more about Athy than the mayor. Of a man who bought two mini-bottles of Powers whiskey, he said, “You never know, bad is good,” a gnomic utterance I couldn’t parse. A Nigerian stepped to the counter next, but he left empty-handed. “Looking for strap,” Frank muttered. “Strap” means credit. “Funny lad, only recently in town.” After the Nigerian came a woman with an infant; she asked for six slices of corned beef.
O’Brien’s grocery earns about four times as much as the pub, but it’s amazing that it earns any money at all, since it’s besieged by supermarkets and chain stores on every corner. What you get in the bargain, though, is Frank, and the locals are willing to invest in the relationship, even if it costs a few pennies more. Frank knows the names of many customers, and he never rushes to complete a transaction and is always ready for a chat. You learn things from him, too, as I did when he urged me to attend the annual Shackleton Weekend. Ernest Shackleton, the Antarctic explorer and a descendant of Abraham Shackleton, was born in Kilkea near Ballitore, and Athy honors him every year.
Another Nigerian materialized in the shop. He distributed some fliers for the Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministry, the Domain of Total Deliverance and Heaven-shaking Prayers, a Lagos-based church whose Athy rep was Pastor Emmanuel Aboluwade. Frank thanked the man and piled the fliers on a potato chip carton for the moment. Students from twenty different countries were enrolled at one of the girls’ schools in town, he said, and a Nigerian boy had become a star rugby player for a junior division team. Frank’s cousin, a Vicentian priest, had volunteered at an orphanage about a thousand miles from Lagos, and Frank still sent an occasional donation. I’d spent time in Nigeria myself, and asked about the precise location of the orphanage.
“Have to look it up,” Frank replied. “Me and the cousin, we haven’t been communicating since he died.”
While Frank dealt with another shopper, I peeked into the lounge off the bar, once a parlor and even less seductive than O.Connor’s. A door marked “Private” led to Frank’s quarters, and the pub’s toilets were in the garden. When he returned to his perch, I asked if the lounge got much use. Frank looked startled, taken aback. He’d hosted two meetings there just last week, both for groups of meggers. I stared at him blankly, so he elaborated. Meggers is Athy slang for horseshoe players, and the game is a favorite among farmers, who have ample access to shoes. They’re very serious, he declared, and have even traveled to the States to compete in world championships. He seemed flattered the groups had chosen O’Brien’s for their deliberations.
More delicately, I inquired whether or not the pub would be busy later on. I’d been the only one at the bar all afternoon. Frank felt sure that it would be, although the hot spot on Saturday night was J. Anderson Market House across the square. Instead of a lovely painted shop front, it had a dull industrial look, and was plastered with ads for rock bands and cheap beer. “Four bouncers there.” Frank smiled and tapped his chest. “Here only me.” He has a daughter, who assists him all the time, so I asked if she might be the proprietor some day. He appeared to think so, but that wasn’t a discussion he wished to pursue. “I work on the present,” he said, a wise man, indeed.
Chapter 11
CLOSING TIME
Sunday mornings in my part of Dublin are languid, even mildly comatose. People wake to their lives with a certain reluctance. For a Californian accustomed to the footfall of joggers at dawn, it’s strange to go out for coffee and find the streets empty. You feel like a gunslinger in Tombstone, whose impending duel has forced the decent folks to take cover inside. The sensation of emptiness grows stronger if the weather’s awful, as it was on my return from Athy. I could almost hear my neighbors groan and bundle their heads under their pillows after they’d had a peek at the leaden sky. There’s a gray in Ireland that trumps all the other grays I’ve ever seen, and when it casts its pall, Dubliners can be forgiven for staying in bed.
The rain, bitter-cold, did not begin until the early evening, while I was doing some errands downtown. To escape it, I took refuge at James Toner, where Yeats had sipped his sherry—just one, although Toner’s implies otherwise. “It is rumored that Toner’s was the only pub W. B. Yeats drank in,” says its brochure, gilding the lily. “He was known to sip a sherry and leave.” Here was a bid nearly as bold as Guinness’s appropriation of Joyce. Is there anywhere else on earth where writers are held in such commercial esteem? True, Shakespeare earns a nod in England, and Hemingway owns Key West, but as brand-name authors they’re not in the same league as the Irish contingent, who’d have demanded free drinks for life if they’d had a crystal ball.
Frank O’Brien and the O’Connors were still on my mind, naturally. They were the last of their breed, so heartfelt, honest, and witty they’d touched me deeply. The survival of their pubs—and of rural pubs in general—had just been dealt another critical blow, however, in the form of a new directive concerning the drink-driving laws. There was a move to lower the permissible level of blood alcohol even further, bringing it into line with Sweden’s ultra-strict policy, essentially one of zero tolerance. (The Swedes don’t drink much per capita—Luxembourg, Hungary, and Ireland rank first, second, and third among EU members—and yet they have the highest rate of drink-related fatalities on the road.) If the new law were to be rigidly enforced, some drivers could be charged after a single beer, and the effect on isolated pubs in the country could be devastating.
Nobody condones drinking and driving, yet it happens all the time wherever alcohol is served. When the Irish are over the limit, one study indicates, they don’t worry about their safety or the safety of others. What deters them is the chance that they’ll be subjected to a random test. It isn’t the local cops who usually initiate the checkpoints, though. They’re orchestrated from central command to show that the government is tackling the “carnage on the roads.” (The Christmas holidays, with their ceaseless parties, are a peak season for random testing.) The operation is high-profile and media-friendly, conducted under the bright lights, and though the penalties are real and severe, the exercise carries an element of public relations. Still, it’s been successful enough to scare off many people including the old bachelor farmers, who’ve been driving to their local for years without incident, and some think that’s a shame.
This “get tough” attitude is yet another aspect of the transformative dust I’d watched alter almost every facet of life in the Republic. The pace of change accelerates so briskly, without a backward glance, it can leave you stunned and breathless, as if you should be sprinting to catch up. If you blink in Ranelagh, the neighborhood may look different when you open your eyes again. Where did Papillon Skincare, a purveyor of glycolic peels and microdermabrasion, come from, anyway? What was a glycolic peel, and why would anyone submit to it? From the compost of decayed pharmacies and defunct shoemak
ers, the new shops sprout like mushrooms—expensive jewelry, art galleries, designer frocks, and stiletto heels from Italy.
No business in Ranelagh stands still for very long. Two convenience stores, a supermarket, and an off-license with a huge selection of wine had been remodeled and doubled in size in the past month. The same principle applies in the field of real estate. Any house that’s sold will be done up right away. The buyers knock down walls, they build conservatories and marble-topped kitchens. What’s an extra hundred grand in improvements when you’ve already paid a million or more for a semi-detached fixer-upper? Mario’s pizzeria knocked down a wall, too, and became a trattoria with exposed brick and subdued lighting. We have Thai food, dim sum, and killer burritos on Ranelagh Road. Indeed, I’d heard the phrase “gourmet ghetto” bandied about. Only pistachio oil had fallen by the wayside, superseded by Alfonso mango, Habugo ham, and dried tomato petals.
My Irish friends approve of the changes in Ranelagh, by and large. They remember the old Ireland all too well—dominated by the church, sexually repressive, financially strapped, and removed from the cultural mainstream—so they’re not disturbed by the absence of chip shops and corner markets. Pubs don’t appeal to them, traditional or not, and they seldom go to one except for a sports event they can’t get on cable TV, as I’d observed at Mulligan’s. Instead, they prefer the upstairs wine bar at TriBeCa, where the walls are lined with cases of vintage imports, and you can have a plate of Spanish charcuterie with your bottle of Rioja. A pint of stout would seem gross in that sophisticated context, unrefined and weirdly menacing, a bellybuster to slow down rather than speed up your mental processes. For my friends, the pub is old-fashioned. It speaks of yesteryear.