"One Out of Three Ain't Bad"

(A work in progress)

 Ireland has a unique "pub culture" which foreigners sometimes find difficult to comprehend. The local bar or lounge is often the hub of a community, where business and socialising is conducted. Children are introduced to the atmosphere when babes in arms; even politicians conduct their weekly constituency"clinics" in a "snug" of the local pub. We look for road directions by asking "what pub is it near?" Irish tourists find it strange when they go abroad and find cafes or bistros instead of bars, and are happy to get home again "for a decent pint." The legal drinking age here is 18 years, but I began when I was sixteen. Though I still enjoy a beer, I now seldom go to a pub. The following pages reminisce about days when I did little else.
Once, a lifestyle acquired me. When I began drinking (in a hostelry not too close to home), two pints of ale was my limit, and each was hard-won enough, I thought, when, under-aged and pimpled, I swayed to the counter and made a mumbling order to a sarcastic, culchie barman.

The pub was well-known to us teens as a spot where you'd get a drink -- or a summons, if the Guards raided, which wasn't uncommon either -- until you'd had your limit, at which time you were tipped, unceremoniously, out a back door to wander, crabwise, for a bus.

Will & John, February 1983

Its interior was dark and smelly; its carpets threadbare; its floors treacherously uneven; the seating, if you could call it that, had ripped, brown leatherette coverings with cigarette burns, a leftover 70s working-man's pub, about to realise, grudgingly and late, that the 80s had come and were marching on and that the presence of youth meant money.

I only drank in that Terenure dive a short while before I heard about another place, one in which the young buck about town could enjoy his favourite poison, not hunched in a corner of the suburbs, one eye on the door, avoiding the baleful glances of his near-locals, but wrapped in city anonymity, in a perpetual fog of nicotine; overpowering heat; the primal smell of genuine leather; rich, oily perfumes, and the ear-splitting din of a bass-heavy, basement jukebox.

'Lead on,' I said, and lost the next eight years, underground...

 

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