'I regard proper pubs as David Attenborough views the Serengeti, with curiosity, affection and protective concern'
'The best of them remain warm blankets to wrap around shivering spirits. Metaphorical hot toddies for days when the sun declines to shine'
Push open heavy, timeworn oak doors that stand sentinel at the border crossing from the ordinary, monochrome world and there, splendid and thrilling, it looms.
An ancient kingdom, a half-lit world of wonder, a palazzo for the mind, a refuge for the soul, a storehouse of so many yesterdays, an independent republic where porter and palaver are the abiding, immune-to-fashion currencies. Paradise found.
We refer to treasures worthy of elevation to UNESCSO World Heritage Site status: The proper, centuries-old traditional Irish pub. Where When Saturday Comes prefers to find himself when Saturday comes.
Upon reading this week that 1,800 bars closed across this country between 2005 and 2021, a bone-deep sadness invaded my being. It felt a little like the erasing of our own backstory, for what are these long-time societal centrepieces if not keepers of a flame illuminating so much of our past?
The best of them remain warm blankets to wrap around shivering spirits. Metaphorical hot toddies for days when the sun declines to shine.
When feeling a tad flat, nothing compares, for this Dub, to a few weekend hours in Kehoe's, The Palace or Neary's - or Mulligan's, Grogan's, Briody's, The Long Hall, The Swan, Bowe's, Toner's, The Bank, The Boar's Head, The Dame, McDaid's, Fallon's, Cleary's, The Gravediggers', The Hut, O'Connell's, The Lord Edward, Tom Kennedy's, Chaplin's, Sheehan's or so many more - for pumping up the tyres of the psyche.
Watering holes where a thirst for both a pint and something weighty and philosophical is sated. Even those that serve no food other than the blessed ham and cheese toastie can be Michelin-starred dining halls on which the hungry mind can gorge.
I regard proper, antiquity-stained pubs as David Attenborough views the creatures of the Serengeti. With boundless curiosity, bottomless affection and protective concern. Along with the written word, the GAA, family and friends, they stand at the summit of my interests, the supreme passion of my life.
For these are vital Irish monuments, archives, repositories of history, timeless and gorgeous landmarks - the Cliffs of Moher with a roof and a cellar room. Centuries old, yet more photogenic than any supermodel. Mute, yet boasting a lyricism to which Joyce or Yeats might be inclined to defer.
Fortresses of serenity, geysers of considered conversation, islands of calm and sameness on a sometimes too rapidly spinning and evolving planet. Curators of Ireland's story, observers of the passing decades, playhouses offering up the most splendid theatre pieces.
Let me offer you a sneak preview, a trailer of the stage show at which I hope to take a prized high stool early this afternoon.
Act One, Scene One: The birdsong of stout being coaxed from the tap, a gentle hiss as melodic to the drinking man or woman's ear as the soaring trill that avian Pavarotti, the December robin, summons from its tiny, trembling red breast.
Neither Electric Picnic's moment of supreme musical triumph nor the most thunderous symphony conjured by Brian Johnson, Angus Young and AC/DC at Croke Park this evening can compare. Moving in the opposite direction to the ageing Aussie rockers we are now on a Highway to Heaven.
Now, The Anticipation: An approximately 100-second, quasi-religious experience during which the stout reveals a miraculous chameleon-like capacity to change colour, advancing across a rainbow of darkness, morphing from fawn to brown and, at last, angels chorusing hosannas above the counter, to fully-formed raven blackness.
In that moment comes confirmation that William Wordsworth, though an immensely gifted poet, got it wrong when he insisted that "earth has not anything to show more fair" than the view at dawn from Westminster Bridge. Oh, but Willie, my dear oul' mucker, it does, it does, it does.
The first sip, a moment of supreme attainment, unearthly joy, a pile of worldly troubles dissolving in the froth of their sudden insignificance. Almost a quarter of a millennium has passed since the death of the essayist and poet Samuel Johnson, yet in the intervening 240 years it is doubtful that anybody can have spoken a more profound truth than his 18th century pearl of erudition.
"There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as a good tavern."
The words on these two pages amount to an ode, a love-poem, a clumsy distilling into a thousand words of the uplift I experience crossing the threshold of a venerable bar in Dublin or Dingle or Dungarvan or Donegal. Old pubs, those soothing, stoic, silent witnesses to the centuries, the richest of all our great cultural treasures, are - by the combined distance travelled by every Guinness barge to have sailed down the Liffey - my most beloved places on earth.
Over thirty five years of walking this Celtic Camino, yet still any pilgrimage to The Palace or Neary's or Kehoe's fills me with childish giddiness. These institutions are Ireland's Louvre or Uffizi, storehouses of wonder that are true to Albert Einstein's definition of a museum as "the silent narrators of humanity's journey through time."
So much history stains their walls. Kehoe's was born in 1803, two years after the Act of Union, the Palace took its first breath in 1823. Immortal institutions of our capital city that predate even Stephen Cluxton's debut in blue. Few chapters in the story of Ireland - from Famine to Easter Rising, Celtic Tiger to IMF bailout - have escaped their all-seeing eyes.
They looked on impassively as Dev and Mary Robinson, Forty Coats and Bang Bang, The Pillar and The Royal came and went. Long, lazy Saturday afternoons lost in a nook of one (or several) of these havens, with friends, or a book, a newspaper or, sometimes, just a pint of porter and my imagination for company, is to draw from an unrivalled wellspring of contentment.
And to savour the half-forgotten music of human interaction. Con Houlihan, an infinitely wise creature who, like all men of taste, was transfixed by pubs, once noted: "A bird is known by its song, a man by his conversation."
That quote hangs like a one-sentence proclamation on the wall behind the bar of that Fleet Street, Babylon, The Palace Bar. Nip in today to it or to one of its hundreds of brother pubs across the land: Dick Mack's or Curran's, Morrissey's of Abbeyleix, Leeside's The Welcome Inn, Taafe's at the epicentre of Galway City.
Not so long ago, I re-read J.R Moehringer's The Tender Bar, a homage to his local pub, a watering hole where he instinctively understood that old ghosts met. “Something always comes over me as I walk in the door. I really do hear the voices of all those years. I hear the laughter, the echoes of that laughter.
“There needs to be a place where people come together, freed from their possessions and temporarily free of their identities...where they can be in semi-darkness and tell old stories."
Join me today in pushing open timeworn doors, in entering an enchanted kingdom. In raising a stout-filled glass...to the essence of Ireland, to the thrill of it all.
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