Colm O'Regan: 'A bicycle hanging from the ceiling and stolen road sign for Bweeng isn’t enough to make a pub nice'

Columnist, broadcaster, comedian and author Colm O'Regan pictured in the Maryborough Hotel. Picture Chani Anderson

You have to hand it to London. It really is one of the world’s great cities. 

Not to be all Eamonn Dunphy, but while we have good cities here, we struggle to make them great. 

We could make them great, with a few tweaks. If we stopped letting old buildings rot, had some sort of design philosophy when it came to designing new ones, made it easier for people to live in the centre, and stopped gougers from treating the main streets in the city at 3pm in the afternoon like it was the outside of a chipper/inside of a toilet at 3am in the morning.

To be fair, many of the world’s great cities achieved greatness by transferring wealth from poorer parts of the world over a century. 

Madrid didn’t pay for its palaces and galleries with money from the life-coaching industry. It was good old-fashioned stealing gold and silver. 

London managed to access very low labour costs and cheap timber and cotton for centuries; however they managed it.

But we’ve had a few bob for a while in Ireland too and lots of our streets still look like they’re holding out for a Krispy Kreme. 

It’s all fixable and importantly, there are some things we do very well: Like the simple oul' pub. 

And time and again when you go to a so-called great city, with your refined taste of a pub connoisseur that comes from living in Ireland, you ask yourself: “Why is it so hard to find a nice pub in this place?”

I don’t necessarily mean an Irish pub. I mean a pub in Ireland. Because there are Irish pubs abroad and that doesn’t always mean a nice pub. A bicycle hanging from the ceiling and a stolen road sign for Bweeng isn’t enough.

But there is a basic standard here. Even in the shite pubs here, the ones with the Dickensian men’s toilets, that you’d meet Fagin and Bill Sikes in, the ones that regularly have massive signs saying “UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT” (because the old management were the reason you could get more pharmaceuticals there than in Boots).

Even the worst pubs seem to get a few things right: Seating and lighting.

We were in London for the “is it a bank holiday?” weekend. We walked up and down quite a few streets in the centre. 

There were lots of pubs but not one looked inviting. For some reason many English pubs want you to perch rather than sit. They are laid out purely for ease of cleaning and fighting. Nothing but high stools and leaning areas, like a ChatGPT version of a pub.

And eventually the only one that we settled for after two hours searching was a deconstructed affair with books, couches and board games. Board games have crept in here too, but I rarely see them being played. 

Board games in pubs is like giving children too many toys. They don’t know what to play with. And they distract from the main purpose of a being in a pub: talking shite. No doubt this lack of a good pub is a gross generalisation.

But they’re the best generalisations, the gross ones. I’m sure we were in the wrong area and if we had just gone one street over there were 30 of them, but a comparable search for a nice afternoon pub in Cork would have lasted about 90 seconds and the only delay would be the fear there was an even nicer pub 30 seconds away. 

Comfortable, dark, anonymous, private, not pinting in the full glare of a shopping public. We do that effortlessly.

So we definitely need to fix our cities. The tourists are starting to see through it. 

But in the case of pubs anyway, sometimes a good city is good enough.