Dublin hostelry with a history

Mulligans: Grand Old Pub of Poolbeg Street

Declan Dunne

(Mercier Press, €14.99)

Dublin pubs are not what they once were. Cyril Connolly once described the Palace of the 1940s as having all the friendly warmth of an alligator tank in a zoo, in which the denizens had developed thick skins from years of macerating each other.

Of course there was a time when the middle classes never went into a public house, certainly not with their women folk. The rot started with the introduction of the lounge bar where in the early 50s ladies could happily be served with ‘Gin and It’ – the It in question being Italian vermouth.

Here and there, as the rot set in, some real pubs remained. One of these was Mulligan’s of Poolbeg Street. It was a pub with a special license allowing it to open early in the day for the convenience of the dock workers, all of whom lived in the streets behind the dock in those days.

It was also patronised by journos from the Irish Press, a paper with a surpassing literary flavour if one did not mind the Fianna Fáil politics.

It was also near enough to Trinity’s back door, to get a good dose of students of the Ginger Man era. The very notion of a literary pub is an odd one. Novels, poems, and plays are not written in pubs, but in the lonely isolation of a room somewhere far from a crowd. All too many potential works of genius have died in Dublin pubs, as the potential genius talks them away into the stale smoky air in the course of an evening.

Mulligan’s was a pub where one could then get Guinness served at its proper temperature, not frozen to death in the name of technology. (In fact these days the only Guinness worth drinking in the city of Dublin is that served free to the students “on Commons” in TCD, thanks to the munificence of Lord Iveagh.)

Author Declan Dunne, a journalist with RTÉ, celebrates this old time establishment which somehow has managed to survive the death of the local community on City Quay and the demise of the Irish Press.

An entertaining tome, well up on all the local lore and legend. But beware of a place that is being written up: it can be the kiss of death to many a lovely place.