Publicans upheld smoking ban, let’s trust them on Covid

Bars are well regulated and owners desperate to reopen should be afforded more flexibility, writes Breandán Mac Suibhne

ON the August Bank Holiday Monday, my wife and I and our two girls went out to eat with my cousin, her husband and their daughter and headed to Nancy’s in Ardara.

It is a well-known Donegal establishment, comprising five small rooms cluttered with antique furniture and boasting an impressive collection of Toby jugs above the bar — and, pre-pandemic, a no-less-impressive collection of drinkers huddled around it.

It is a pub that, in the 1980s, pivoted to the tourist trade, offering high-quality, locally sourced seafood yet all the while maintaining a loyal local clientele. Owned by the McHugh family for seven generations, it remains an innovative family run business. In lockdown, Jenny McHugh continued Nancy’s weekly pub quiz over Facebook, and then, finding she was drawing participants from all around the world, she started a mail-order business, shipping hampers of items on the bar’s menu.

But one would not want Jenny’s job. Several members of her extended family have underlying conditions and reopening the bar inevitably involved an element of risk. It also involved weeks of engagement with Safetech to ensure that the staff were fully ready to return to work.

Now, to prevent queues of people forming, there is a booking system, which is a full-time job in itself. Taking bookings, of course, adds to the wage bill, as does the necessity of taking names and phone numbers, and, above all, constant cleaning of touch points, entry points, and surfaces. The essential restrictions, Jenny tells me, have more than doubled the workload — yet the pub’s capacity has more than halved.

And so Nancy’s on Monday night was not the crowded place it usually is in early August with strangers wandering in and out — and one or two locals sitting where they have always sat at the bar. On arrival at the appointed time, we were met by staff with face shields, at one of eight sanitising stations, and directed to a table, which we would have only for a limited time.

For sure, the food was great — it always is; and two of us were not driving so we could take a drink. Yet the strangeness of it all — Nancy’s was never a place one went to socially distance — served as a stark reminder of the extent to which the pandemic has changed our world and, with the reopening of bars now an issue of public debate, over pints and good food it gave us cause to reflect on how the licensed trade has changed profoundly in small towns in our own time.

Back in the mid-1800s Ardara, with a population of just over 600, had 16 licensed premises, most small places doubling as shops; there was also a hotel where the mail coach used to stop. The town’s market and four annual fairs drew large numbers of people from the surrounding district. Then in the late 1800s, the mountain scenery, exceptional beaches and salmon fishing made it a popular holiday destination: it got “visitors” — tourists. The Brennan family developed a bar into a second hotel, but most public houses remained the same — small, a single room with a bar and maybe a back room for more private conversations.

And, notwithstanding the population of the district more than halving in the century after the Famine, the number and the general layout of those licensed premises remained the same into the last third of the 20th Century when a couple of pubs were enlarged to become “lounge bars”.

Then the Troubles took their toll on the number of visitors, as did the advent of cheap foreign holidays. More stringent driving laws had an impact on the trade of public houses and the availability of cheap drink from supermarkets was another nail in the coffin of many pubs.

Just €20 worth of beer bought in a supermarket will allow several people to drink their fill, a retired publican remarked to me last week as he sunned himself on his summer seat; €20 wouldn’t last one person very long in a bar.

And so, one by one, bars closed in Ardara.

Now there are seven licensed premises (including the hotel) where into the 1990s there were 11 — almost a third have closed.

The hotel and three bars serving food were open last week but as evidenced by Nancy’s — with the workload doubled and the capacity more than halved — the coming months will be very challenging indeed for small family run concerns.

Last week’s Donegal Democrat quoted Fine Gael Councillor Martin Harley of Ballybofey, the treasurer of the Vintners Federation of Ireland, estimating that some 100 of the 365 bars in the county may go out of business. He may not be far wrong.

And it is worth remembering, too, that bars doubling as shops, music venues, art galleries, social centres, tourist offices, politicians’ “clinics” and, of course, restaurants have long made Irish country towns more attractive places to live and work and, of course, to visit. We may not realise how much they have meant to us until they are gone.

As I have argued here before, I am happy to wait until the medical experts decide it is safe to return to the pub, that is to reopen “wet” pubs. But we should acknowledge that, while physical distancing collapses at private parties, public houses are closely regulated. Publicans, who enforced the smoking ban, would have responsibility for enforcing social distancing. Once the schools have reopened, let us hope that the Government can devise a more flexible approach to the sector.

All told, our time in Donegal was a welcome change of scene, albeit with me working remotely and staring too long at screens.

Strikingly, the spike in cases reported last Wednesday — 50 new cases, including five in Donegal — caused people to redouble efforts to look out for each other. Popping out to get some messages on Thursday, one could not but notice there were more people wearing face coverings, not just in shops but when walking along the street, and, it seemed to me, people were more scrupulous about sanitising their hands going into places.

We are going to be living with Covid-19 for some time to come — and with care we can do so while recovering some aspects of our prepandemic lives.

But opening schools and universities is the next hurdle.

‘Nancy’s last Monday night was not the same crowded place it usually would be in early August’