End of the traditional Irish pub? Yes please!

SO I’M sitting at the bar of a local pub, back in the days when we took that sort of thing for granted, with a female friend. We’ve bought our drinks, having paid the price of two bottles of supermarket wine for a couple of glasses of something vinegary that’s been open too long, and we’re trying to chat.

Except it’s impossible because the huge television screen behind the bar is blaring out an American football game at top volume. The pub is practically empty, no one’s watching the screen, and we’re the only ones at the bar.

‘Sorry,’ I said to the barman (because women generally begin a polite enquiry with an apology), ‘would you mind turning the telly off?’ ‘Ah no,’ he said, ‘I can’t do that.’ ‘But why not, nobody’s watching it and we can’t hear ourselves talk?’

He got the remote control and, grudgingly, turned the volume down a tad.

‘I can’t turn it off,’ he said, ‘because somebody might come in who wants to see it.’

A man might come in, is what he meant. A proper pub patron, is what he meant. And for far too long, in the world of the famous Irish pub, a potential male customer was infinitely more valued, and more catered-for, than an actual female customer.

They have traditionally been maleoriented and male-dominated environments, and I doubt I’m the only woman who ever felt that, as a non-man in a crowded pub, I was sometimes a non-person.

I can recall walking towards the bar of a pub in Inchicore, Dublin, some years ago, with a male friend who grabbed me at the last minute and steered me into the lounge – crisis averted! Women were not allowed in the bar.

In relatively recent memory, we tolerated being told where we could sit in an Irish pub, some decades after Rosa Parks decided she wouldn’t be told where to sit on an American bus.

And the facilities were certainly never designed with us in mind. Have a look around your typical, old-fashioned pub and note that the ‘gents’ will be located very close to the bar. Actually, there’s no need to look around, your nose will tell you that anyway.

PRINCE Harry infuriated and alienated all of Meghan Markle’s relatives by describing his own clan as ‘the family she never had’. Now her pals seem determined to return the compliment. A close friend of Meghan’s has told Access Hollywood that her pop mogul husband has a ‘father and son’ relationship with the prince. And this was surely said with Meghan’s approval; for all her supposed craving for privacy, it seems, scoring points against the royals is more important. Prince Charles, who hasn’t seen his youngest son since surviving Covid-19, is going to just love that.

The ‘ladies’, though, will be down in a basement, or back at the far end of the lounge, befitting the afterthought it clearly was. And as for the fare on offer well, good luck to those customers (usually women) who wanted anything other than beer or spirits.

In a famous pub on the northside of Dublin, in the early ’90s, I asked for a glass of red wine. The barman made up a concoction of Ribena and port and, when I complained, he didn’t even bother to argue.

Still, it was marginally more palatable than those vile mini bottles of Chilean plonk that Irish pubs then began stocking as a sop to their female clientele.

BUT the options for a group of women who just want a drink and a chat have always been pretty limited in this country. Either you went to a restaurant, and spent a fortune on a meal you didn’t really want, or else you went to a pub and spent the night shouting over the din at your friends while trying to explain to random blokes, who got increasingly belligerent as the night went on, that just because there wasn’t a man among your group of four, it didn’t mean that you were ‘girls on their own’.

Or you formed a book club and pretended to work your way through the Booker longlist just to get out of the house, once in a while, for some wine, nibbles and audible conversation.

So now, we’re told, the pandemic has put paid to the traditional Irish pub, for the time being at least, and, again, I doubt I’m the only woman who reckons that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It might just lead to a pub culture that treats women (who are able to have jobs and earn their own money these days) as hospitably as men.

Those pubs that reopen will have to offer food, waiter service and individual tables, so you can talk and graze in peace. You won’t have to stand in a crush at the bar until every man around you has been served.

And, best of all, the televisions blaring American football, for the benefit of a man who MIGHT come in, will be a thing of the past.