There’s more to rural pubs than just booze

The late Junie Loftus, Tuam’s most famous and accomplished publican, used to claim he had lived next door to Al Capone in the States. Given that Al Capone spent seven years in jail and died in 1947, it was a fantastic claim but I preferred to believe it. To this day, I prefer to believe it. Junie was the perfect, welcoming host, with a stash of tall, eccentric stories and a secondary stash of tall, eccentric liqueurs, from which he would offer you a sample – on the house – in a glass polished to brilliancy.

Christmas Eve in Junie’s was an institution. You’d meet everyone you knew, and there would be Junie in his signature red waistcoat, discreetly seeing to it that everybody was enjoying themselves and nobody was getting into any trouble. And everybody did enjoy themselves, and nobody did get into any trouble.

I was reminiscing about that pleasant tradition of pub-going with family this Christmas, and feeling sad about its loss. It’s been at least five years since I visited a pub – any pub – over Christmas. Where I live now, you can’t enjoy a drink unless you intend to walk home, because not only is there no public transport, there are no taxis either. And there will be no one in the pub anyway – everyone else having arrived at the same judgment – so what would be the point?

Kerry TD Brendan Griffin, pictured below, who is Junior Minister for Tourism, Transport and Sport, has been applying himself to the problem. This week he told the Irish Examiner how he tried to set up an Uber-style roster system in his own community, in which locals would volunteer to transport their neighbours to, or from, the pub one night every month, and avail of the same service themselves. It seems a sensible idea, which is all the more reason for insurers to find a way around it…

‘The insurance companies wouldn’t cover it because it was a rostered arrangement and therefore there was a public transport element to it,’ Griffin said, adding: ‘This is the type of red tape and nonsense that we really need to be getting over.’

Given that insurers’ goto method of getting over red tape is to add a zero or two to the end of a premium, it’s unlikely anyone is going to pay for this measure, least of all the vintners. For the urban pub-goer, rumours of the death of the Irish pub must seem greatly exaggerated.

After all, you can pop into any overflowing Dublin bar, drink today’s putative Patrick Kavanagh under the table, and get home in one piece by public transport.

You can even do the Twelve Pubs of Christmas, if you’re masochistic or stupid enough, and be reasonably confident of being admitted into a taxi afterwards. In rural Ireland though, the pub is not just dead, it’s a graveyard. Not long ago, your local country pub had its small complement of patrons every night of the year, almost all old men and women escaping loneliness or boredom over a few drinks in easy company. Then at Christmastime it would be packed with returned families, everyone in high spirits and full of news. Now, though, the rural pubs – those that haven’t already closed – are all but empty, even at Christmas. As to where the old men and women are going, nobody knows. It isn’t as if there’s anywhere else. The rural pub is dead and it hasn’t been replaced.

Broadly, there are two antagonistic schools of thought on this phenomenon. On one side you have the becapped rural publican more or less urging a shift in public policy priorities – his bottom line first, road safety second. On the other side you have the Prius-driving metropolitan Puritan, wondering why we country people can’t just go to juice bars instead. Between these two arid extremes is a vast, temperate middle ground just waiting to be charted by sensible people. Yes, the vintners’ lobby exerts too strong a political influence, while its members do almost nothing to arrest the decline of their own businesses. And yes, as a society we depend too much on alcohol for our enjoyment. These things are true, and yet acknowledging they’re true does not do away with a concern for that vanishing tradition of sociability and camaraderie and community, in which neighbours had a common venue in which to meet each other in friendship. The prohibition approach doesn’t work, as Al Capone might tell you.