So long, Scruffy’s. You served us well... and often

One dedicated customer recalls a pub’s glory days

THERE used to be a beehive outside a small pub tucked away in a quiet courtyard just off Dublin’s Lower Mount Street, and for years it gave the pub its nickname. Officially Seán Murphy’s, but known to all simply as the Hive, the pub later became famous (and its name widely replicated all over the world), by a different soubriquet, Scruffy Murphy’s, though it remained a hornet’s nest of spiky gossip and intrigue.

When the Hive was taken over by the Mulligan family, who already owned a pub in Stoneybatter, Scruffy Murphy’s became the epicentre of social life in the capital, a place where politicians, journalists, entertainers, and more than a few blackguards, rubbed shoulders, especially on Fridays after work when the crowd frequently spilled out onto the street, such was the throng.

But popularity such as that is fleeting, and the crowd eventually moved on. After changing hands a few times, most recently last year (from which time it has remained shuttered), Scruffy’s is now set for demolition, to be replaced by an aparthotel offering short and longterm lets to visiting businesspeople working on projects in the city’s booming tech sector – a clever idea given its short walking distance to Silicon Docks and the Financial Services Centre.

In its original incarnation, the pub had concrete floors, allegedly because it made the place easier to clean. Staff would simply pour a bucket of water on the floor and students from Trinity College, perhaps used to a little more refinement in their mostly middleclass Protestant world, began calling it Scruffy Murphy’s.

AS Irish Independent journalist and social diarist Myles McWeeney recalled years later, hygiene was not exactly a priority. ‘When I was a student back in the early 1960s, it was, frankly, a fairly basic pub whose sanitary arrangements would have given a case of the vapours to a 21st-century health and safety inspector.’

For McWeeney and his friends, though, it was a haven. ‘We students could make two or three pints of stout stretch for a whole evening of darts and table soccer in Scruffy’s,’ he remembered. ‘The door policy was nil – if you had the price of a pint, you were welcome. Seán was his own bouncer and, for a man of his bulk, could vault the counter with astonishing speed to sort out any bother.’

I can’t remember when I first visited, but it was sometime in the mid-Eighties. It must have been, because I already was a regular when, in 1988, I had my 25th birthday party in the upstairs function room, also a popular venue for product launches. The recently closed Dobbin’s Restaurant was a short walk away, and public-relations companies often scheduled events for Scruffy’s if they knew there had been a lunch earlier.

Invited or not, everyone simply gatecrashed, and the attendance book was never anything but full for events in Scruffy Murphy’s.

At the heart of it all was Paddy Mulligan himself, who worked both sides of the bar depending on his mood. He might serve you a drink one night, and sit and have one with you the next, and his company, given his geniality and fund of indiscreet stories, was coveted.

Because the pub was tucked away in Power’s Court, a small enclave of council houses nestling between the Georgian four-storeys of Upper and Lower Mount Street, there was a feeling of otherworldliness about it, and the (naively mistaken, as it happened) sense that what happened in Scruffy’s stayed in Scruffy’s.

I picked up the payphone one night to make a call (this was long before we had mobiles) and it was connected to another line somewhere in the building. I listened transfixed as a woman asked her husband about a trip to Waterford.

‘I wasn’t in Waterford,’ he said, slightly nervously. ‘Your credit card statement says you were,’ the wife said coldly. ‘Well, it’s wrong,’ he said. ‘That’s funny,’ she continued, ‘because I rang the hotel and they remembered Mr and Mrs [Name] fondly.’

There was a silence that seemed to last forever. ‘That’s typical,’ he finally said. ‘You’re always snooping on me and I hate you.’

I often wonder if they made it through their troubles but it’s hard to see how there was any way back from that.

On another occasion, I had fallen foul of management at the Evening Herald, where I worked at the time, and decided to drown my newly unemployed sorrows in Scruffy’s. The first person I spotted was Michael ‘Mickser’ Hand, a former editor of the Sunday Independent who had also become superfluous to requirements in Middle Abbey Street a few years before, and by then, was working for Vincent Browne in the Sunday Tribune. He called me over to the bar.

‘I heard about your troubles, son,’ he said. ‘Can you do page layouts?’ ‘I can,’ I said. ‘Are you computer literate?’ ‘I am.’ ‘Do you want a job?’ ‘I do.’

After a slightly more formal interview two days later, I was working again. That’s the sort of thing that happened in Scruffy’s all the time. It was all about networking, and never more so than in April 1990, when ten regulars, including Paddy Mulligan himself, formed a syndicate to win the National Lottery jackpot by buying every possible combination of numbers for a rollover draw.

The mastermind was a PolishIrishman mathematician called Stefan Klincewiez, who I knew from his regular visits to me in the Evening Herald as he tried to sell the idea of a foolproof way to make millions. I dismissed him as a fantasist, but the others did not, and justifiably so, because his method proved very successful indeed.

At the time, there were only 36 numbers in the draw, compared to today’s 49, and buying all combinations cost £973,896 (€1,236,592 converted to euro, or just over €2.1million adjusted for inflation). Lottery HQ got wind of the attempted coup and tried to block it by limiting the number of tickets any one agent could sell, but the syndicate simply moved around, eventually buying 1.6million combinations for £820,000.

They indeed had the winning numbers for the £1.7million jackpot, but so did two others, and only the multiple payouts on Match 4 and Match 5 drove them into profit of roughly £300,000.

MULLIGAN was elated. ‘It was hard to come down,’ he said. ‘I just drifted through the days in an irresponsible way. The merry-go-round kept spinning. Then one morning I snapped back into reality. I came into the pub and started rolling the kegs. The main difference winning the Lotto has made to me is that my bank manager now doesn’t have to leave me messages twice a week asking me to phone him urgently.’

Within a few years, though, he was getting those calls again. The money dried up and, as is always the case, the crowd found new hotspots, the likes of Doheny & Nesbitt’s, Toner’s and the Horseshoe Bar at the Shelbourne. Paddy sadly became a little too fond of his own wares and Scruffy’s was eventually sold; he died in 2011.

I was going to say it will be sad to see Scruffy’s go, but the truth is, I actually haven’t been through the door this century; I would guess it’s at least 20 years since I had a pint there. I will, though, remember it with great fondness. Its heyday is forever woven into the riotous tapestry of Dublin’s social life. It was brash, raucous, gossipy and bitchy in equal measures. It was as of its time as stonewash denim and shoulder pads, and a place you could go to alone, confident you would meet a dozen friends without organising a night out at all.

In the age of planned everything – by phone, texts and WhatsApp – that old tradition, at least, is worth celebrating.