A Pint of Plain

by Bill Barich

  One wants to doubt such boldness, but it happens to be true. Diageo-Guinness USA, a division of Guinness Limited, spreads the gospel through the Irish Pub Concept, initiated in Germany in 1992 to “facilitate the development of authentic, high quality Irish pubs outside Ireland.” Among its recruiting tools is a Web site, whose claims could not be called modest. Investors who adhere to the IPC model achieve a success rate of 99 percent, the site all but guarantees, since they get the benefits of a branded franchise without any of the royalties, fees, or rules. The IPC focuses on four key elements that make an “Irish” pub special, even if it’s in Toledo—the design and ambience; a friendly bar staff with some real Irish members; Irish music, live or recorded, and entertainment; and Irish food and drink. DGUSA helps an investor pull together the package through advice, referrals, and training sessions.

  For would-be publicans, DGUSA provides tips on real estate and location, as well as introductions to potential sources of capital. It sells the Irish Pub Concept Business Plan ($500) and the apparently less informative Insider’s Guide to the Irish Pub Concept ($50). It directs clients to an agency that can supply Irish staffers, who have the proper visas and an ability to combine “humor and hospitality,” and to dealers in Irish and Guinness-branded bric-a-brac. Also available are copies of the Irish Pub Food Recipe Book, although it costs $150 if purchased outside the training course. The sound system of choice is DMX’s Profusion X, a device that adapts its music to the time of day and the customers’ energy level. Buyers are instructed in “How to Pour the Perfect Pint,” too, a line that actually bears a Guinness trademark and sets a new standard for corporate overkill that the folks at Coca-Cola would envy.

  For the all-important design & build phase, the IPC Web site has links to several approved, independently owned firms. The Irish Pub Company in Dublin is among the oldest and most visible, and perhaps the most active and profitable, so I arranged to meet with Noel Darby, a company rep, to hear more about it. It’s the brainchild of Mel McNally, Darby explained over coffee. He described McNally as an architect and a potter, who has a solid head for business. McNally founded the company in 1991 to foster his dream of turning the Irish pub into a marketable commodity, much as Guinness was doing at the same time, so he took a year off to travel and study the subject in detail, researching the origins and history of pubs until he devised five distinctive prototypes—Country Cottage, Brewery, Gaelic, Victorian Dublin, and, yes, Traditional.

  To date, the Irish Pub Company has built about five hundred pubs in forty-five countries. Italy, its foremost client, has almost reached the saturation point, with more than a hundred Harrington & Son—style operations strung from Milan to Palermo. (Names must be chosen carefully, the Irish Pub Concept site suggests. The tag “& Son” confers a patina of history.) There’s no shortage of new applicants, though, with plenty of prospective moguls in Russia, China, and Dubai, where the company already has twenty employees, clamoring for an opportunity. Some projects are small and simple, Darby noted, while others are huge and complex, such as Nine Fine Irishmen, the pub McNally and his crew cooked up for MGM’s New York-New York Hotel & Casino on the Vegas strip. The Irishmen led a futile rising in 1848, but that hasn’t hurt business. With its slogan “A place for stout hearts, powerful convictions, and strong livers,” the pub has been a huge hit and grosses about $14 million a year.

  McNally not only dreams, designs, and throws pots—he, too, invests in pubs. He and a partner own the Fadó chain, the biggest in America with fourteen branches, and also Guinness’s thirstiest U.S. customer. You can’t lose with an “Irish” pub—that was Noel Darby’s message, an echo of DGUSA’s, and he pulled out some data to back it up. If a British pub switches to an Irish theme, say, and refits its interior with tin signs, etched Jameson mirrors, and so on, its profits frequently triple. The average monthly turnover at an Irish pub is nearly four times greater than at an American bar of the same size. A pub—Country Cottage or otherwise—can be designed and built in about eighteen weeks, and it should pay for itself in twelve to eighteen months, Darby promised, with thirty-six months as an outside figure.

  “I’ve never known a pub to fail,” he claimed, so gratified investors often snap up a second and then a third. Pierre Doyle began with an O’Reilly’s in Amsterdam in 1994, for instance, and has since sprinkled around O’Reilly’s in Dublin, Heidelberg, and Brussels. A prime location is essential, Darby allowed, as is good management, but the single factor that matters most is the “authenticity of replication.” That gave me pause. The authenticity I fell for at McSorley’s (& Sons!) proved to be phony, and it would be doubly so if you copied it and transplanted it elsewhere—in Guam, say—but most people don’t seem to care. As long as they can imagine they’re in Ireland, the natives of Guam—and the Italians, the Spaniards, the Americans, and so forth—are able to ignore the fact that they’ve never left home at all.

  By accident, I later came across a paper at the National Library that advanced a theory to account for this curious syndrome. Published in the Journal of Consumer Research under the incredibly verbose title “Consumer Perception of Iconicity and Indexicality and Their Influence on Assessments of Authentic Market Offerings,” its authors asserted that most scholars “agree that authenticity is not an attribute inherent in an object, and is better understood as an assessment made by a particular evaluation in a particular context.” In other words, authenticity is in the eye of the beholder, a conclusion I found difficult to accept. Maybe Ireland truly is the Ancient Birthplace of Good Times, though, where “it’s like being in a nineteenth century novel, with better food and a happier ending,” as the Irish Tourist Board had put it in a recent promotion.

  One Saturday afternoon, I took a break from my diligent research and dashed through the rain that fell all that June, once again quashing my dream of a sweltering Irish summer, to Paddy Power, a bookmaker on Lower Baggot Street, where I placed a bet on the Ascot Gold Cup, the race James Joyce commemorated before he went to work for Guinness. It would have been far too simple to indulge my literary side and settle on Yeats, the favorite and eventual winner, so I threw my money at Sergeant Cecil instead, and when he refused to march toward victory, I consoled myself at Doheny & Nesbitt, conveniently located right across the way.

  Nesbitt’s, as it’s known, is a trophy. The Irish Pub Company might call the look Victorian Dublin, but only the front bar, with its snugs, mirrored partitions, and ornate ceiling of papier mâché, is original, while the back bar or lounge is just authentically replicated. It draws a mixed crowd of professionals who take a serious interest in sports, so I expected the place to be jam-packed with gamblers like Nosey Flynn, doomed to search eternally through the pages of Ulysses for a hot tip he never gets, but Nesbitt’s was deserted except for an Italian tourist, who sat reading Corriere della Serra rather than the Racing Post. In the echoing vacancy, I thought I heard another sigh escape from the lips of tradition.

  I drank a pint, anyway, and tried to parse the reasons for the success of the “Irish” pub as a commodity for export. What was the secret? DGUSA had even introduced a new wrinkle with its portable, free-standing pub (thirty-six kegs sold at JFK Airport in the first month!) and the Irish Snug Pub, a close cousin (eighty kegs at Fenway Park on the first weekend!). Mel McNally’s group offered some possible explanations—the craic, the ambience, the casual sociability, the chance for people to relax and be themselves—but I still sensed other factors at work, although I couldn’t put my finger on them, not yet.

  Ireland’s woeful battle with alcohol worsened during the nineteenth century, I learned on my return to the library. Whiskey, once a luxury of the elite, had filtered down to street level and spawned a legion of dram shops, where you could buy “a poison productive of vice, riot, and disease, hostile to all habits of decency, honesty, and industry, and, in short, destructive to the souls and bodies of our fellow creatures,” as the Reverend James Whitelaw harangued in 1805. Yet the British House of Commons, looking into
the issue a few years later, wondered if whiskey might not be indispensable to the Irish as a palliative against the cold, damp weather. Its medicinal uses were manifold, in fact. When combined with boiled nettles, it was prescribed as a cure for measles.

  The devotees of whiskey were immune to such chastisement, naturally, and would have agreed instead with the analysis of Richard Stanihurst, a contributor to Holished’s Chronicles, who once sang the praises of malt. A dram had the power to keep “the head from whirling, the eies from dazeling, the toong from lisping, the mouth from maffling, the teeth from chattering,” and so on, Stanihurst wrote, although he added a caveat, “if it be orderly taken.” That warning, too, was roundly ignored. Whiskey and every other drink were “taken” in corrosive measures. One trick of the gentry, who kept elaborate cellars, was to serve wine in a stemless glass that forced the guests to gulp it down before it spilled and lose their bearings sooner rather than later. When young blades met to carouse, they might ask the tavern boy to remove their shoes, hide them, and scatter broken glass by the door to keep anyone from leaving early.

  Though drunkards might be a public embarrassment, casting the Irish in a negative light and shoring up a stereotype, the truth was more complicated. A great many citizens of the Republic never touched a drop. Almost all women abstained, as did the devoutly religious, both Catholic and Protestant, and the abstainers often joined church-led temperance crusades that were largely ineffectual until Father Theobald Mathew, a charismatic Capuchin dedicated to helping the poor, assumed control of the Cork Total Abstinence Society in 1838. The impact of the “Apostle of Temperance” was immediate. In less than a year, the society’s membership jumped from a few dozen people to about 130,000 in Cork alone. Between November and December 1839, Father Mathew signed up about 230,000 members in Limerick and Waterford. By 1843, about half of Ireland’s adult population had taken the pledge to forgo alcohol in all its murderous forms, and that led to a significant reduction in crime. The drunkards had even vanished in some towns.

  “On visiting the public houses of my own district during the night,” wrote the astonished A. B. Hill, a constable in Dunmore, County Kilkenny, “I found them closed and the inmates in bed, a stranger proof of the working of the Society I could not adduce.”

  The pledge itself was simple. “I promise to abstain from all intoxicating drinks, except used medicinally, and by the order of a medical man,” it went, “and to discountenance the cause and practice of intemperance.” (The medical proviso was dropped later.) Those willing to recite it, usually poor and illiterate, were rewarded with pamphlets, a numbered pledge card, and a medal. On one side, the medal showed a happy family sitting by the fire. The husband held a banner that read “Prosperity,” while his wife’s banner celebrated “Domestic Comfort.” Swans and doves cavorted to convey the benefits of an idyllic alcohol-free existence, but the medal’s other side portrayed the evils of Demon Whiskey. A frothing drunk was about to bean his wife in the head with a hammer, cheered on by an audience of serpents and vultures.

  In Dublin, Father Mathew’s crusade stumbled. When he reached the city in 1840, the big crowds did not materialize, and the press treated him more harshly than it did in the provinces. Still, the society continued to exert a substantial degree of control, and its grip over the committed was very nearly absolute until it began to unravel. Some believe the church let the apostle down by not lending him its unqualified support, but his inability to enlist Ireland’s middle and upper classes also hurt the movement. Father Mathew’s finances were a shambles, as well. He required three secretaries to answer his mail, ran up a large printing bill for his pamphlets, and was a soft touch who gave too generously to marching bands and other temperance affiliates. In 1844, he endured the humiliation of being arrested for his debts, and his crusade was at an end.

  The temptation to backslide was constant for members, of course, and more acute than ever after an increase in whiskey production made the price of a dram even cheaper. Workers were often paid in pubs and encouraged to have at least one drink before they left, and though a man might have taken the pledge and stuck to it in the past, he must have felt his willpower caving in as he labored in the shadow of the Great Famine—during which, surprisingly, there was still plenty of drink around and more than enough bars to serve it. Not until Frederick Shaw, Dublin’s recorder in the mid-1850s, clamped down on the number of licenses he granted did the accelerated growth rate of pubs slow down. As a consequence, the value of an average pub jumped by about 500 percent over the next twenty years, and some publicans joined the ranks of the bourgeoisie, dabbled in politics, and became respected pillars of the community.

  The cutback in licenses did not affect the city’s hard-core crew of drunkards, though. Throughout the 1870s, Dublin outpaced London, ten times its size, when it came to citations for being drunk in public, with one woman racking up 264 convictions in a single year. After the pubs closed, the crew retreated into shebeens (from the Irish sibin, alternately “little mug,” “weak beer,” or “illicit alehouse”), frequently no more than a cramped hovel advertised only by a candle or a hunk of lighted turf in a window. To keep the cops at bay, scouts stood outside and sounded an alarm. The extraordinary craving for alcohol reached its apex, perhaps, with the Whiskey Fire of 1875, when a warehouse in the Liberties burned down and spilled hot whiskey into the street, prompting people to lap it up from the gutter.

  Yet some authorities understood that the desire for oblivion was due in part to the wretchedness of tenement life. Early in the twentieth century, almost one third of all Dubliners were confined to scruffy apartment blocks that had no toilets or running water. In general, a family shared one room only, even though most couples had between six and twelve children and sometimes as many as twenty. There might be a bed or two, but children usually slept on straw mattresses on the floor. Cooking was done over an open fire, and the same fire was used to heat up the bathwater. Slop buckets stored in corners or in the hall had to be emptied daily. No one had an ounce of privacy, either, so the pub afforded men, at least, the chance to gather in a more amenable space.

  “The workman is blamed for visiting the public house, but it is to him what the club is to the rich man,” noted Sir Charles Cameron, chief health inspector of Dublin. “His home is rarely comfortable and in the winter the bright light, the warm fire, and the gaiety of the public house are difficult to resist.”

  It was inevitable, however, given the scale of the abuse, that a cry for temperance would rise again, this time led by Father James Cullen, a Jesuit, who formed the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association of the Sacred Heart in 1898. At first he accepted only women as members, because he felt they were more spiritual and had witnessed the debilitating effect of liquor on their male cohorts, but he soon changed his mind. Cullen did not crusade in the manner of Father Mathew. Instead, he taught by example. Pioneers wore a pin with an image of the Sacred Heart, and for years potential brides viewed this as a positive sign when they were choosing a husband. Cullen criticized “weary wobblers”—those who drank on the continent, say, but not at home, or who drank only on ceremonial occasions—and endorsed the singing of temperance songs such as the one that recounted the horrors visited on a downtrodden family “after Mary took her drop”:

  The children are neglected and our house is poor and bare

  Our parlour once so pretty, scarce a table has or chair

  Our Nell is so neglected that her head is like a mop

  There is no-one now to care her, since Mary took her drop.

  Other popular tunes were “Bacchus Dethroned,” “Make War on Demon Drink,” and “The Sweet Lemonade.”

  Cullen’s message carried tremendous clout among Catholics, who’d been instructed that getting drunk on purpose was a sin, although they found it an easy sin to forgive. As Jack Boyle said of another character in Juno and the Paycock, “I don’t believe he was ever drunk in his life—sure he’s not like a Christian at all.” Mild jokes at the clergy�
�s expense also had some currency.

  “Pat,” warned the priest, “you are at it again. You must keep away from drink. It is your mortal enemy.”

  “Wisha, Father,” Pat replied. “Wasn’t it only Sunday last your Reverence told us to love our enemies?”

  “Well, then, if I did,” the priest said, “I never told you to swallow them.”

  The most prominent temperance hero during Cullen’s reign was the redoubtable Matt Talbot (1856–1925), a typical child of the tenements, deprived and unable to read, with a hard-drinking disciplinarian of a father and a mother who provided shelter from the storm. At the age of twelve, Talbot went to work for Burke’s Wine Merchants in Dublin, dipped into the porter, and often returned home drunk, a habit that multiplied when his father, who was in charge of the bonded liquor at the Custom House, secured a job for him there in order to keep an eye on him. That put Talbot too close to the whiskey, though, and soon he was a debilitated alcoholic and spent the next twelve years in a hazy stupor, squandering his money in pubs until he took the pledge.

  Thereafter he lived as rigorously as a stylite in a small room his mother sometimes shared. He slept on rough wooden planks on an iron bed, with a chunk of wood for a pillow, and knelt to eat his meals of stale bread and tea or cocoa, although he liked a little meat as a treat on Christmas Day. When he went to bed, he clutched a statue of the Virgin and Child to his chest and slept for just three and a half hours, then woke to kneel and pray again before he attended early Mass. Under his clothes, he wrapped heavy chains around his body as a form of penance, but no one knew about it until he was rushed to a hospital after a heart attack. Declared the Venerable Matt Talbot in 1973, he cannot be beatified without the proof of a physical miracle. His canonization would require a second, and some would say that’s asking a lot.