Joe McNamee: 'Old Dublin pubs are one of the best things about our capital city'

The Guinness Irish Pub Concept became a thriving business that kicked off in the early 90s, designing and building interiors for five different pub styles

If The Irish Pub maintains a certain academic detachment, The Dublin Pub (TDP) is at times akin to sitting at the bar and hearing it all first-hand from a highly informed fellow imbiber. 

I rarely think of alcohol during my annual Dry January yet this time around have become obsessed with Irish pubs. Well, that’s thanks to the publication of two excellent new tomes: The Irish Pub: Invention and Re-Invention (Cork University Press), edited by Moonyoung Hong and Perry Share; and The Dublin Pub: A Social and Cultural History (New Island), by Donal Fallon, of the excellent Three Castles Burning podcast.

The Irish Pub (TIP) is an academic study with contributions covering history, design, literary studies and social sciences and is rarely less than fascinating. If you’re the prosaic type, believing a pub is just a pub, then a breakdown of the types to be found amongst approximately 7,500 on this island, North and South, might trigger mental recalibration: “… tourist pubs, food pubs, singing pubs, literary pubs, craft beer pubs, old man pubs, classic Victorian pubs, suburban beer barns, grocery shop pub, early houses, late bars, LGBTQIA+ pubs, sports bars, cocktail bars, hotel bars, racecourse bars, airport bars, listening bars, whiskey bars, even the odd (in both senses of the word) alcohol-free pub ….” The fundamental question addressed is, “what makes an ordinary building that serves alcohol the Irish pub as we know, consume and experience it today?” And TIP’s commendable approach to answering that is infinitely more nuanced and subtle than the often reductive binary (‘good’ or ‘bad’) texture of public discourse, usually in relation to law, politics and health.