PARCHED FOR DÁIL BAR TO RETURN
Oireachtas watering hole regulars are desperate for it to reopen but they’ll have to wait another week...
THIRSTY politicians will have to wait a week longer than expected before their exclusive Oireachtas watering hole is restored.
After a 106-day closure, the majority of Irish pubs which serve food are expected to reopen tomorrow.
However, the Irish Mail on Sunday has learned that contrary to initial expectations that the Dáil Bar would reopen on Monday, our politicians will have to wait a week as the bar is readied for the postcoronavirus landscape.
Senior sources confirmed the bar will ‘totally comply with the conditions on social distancing, the 105-minute time limit [for customers] and the necessity to purchase a nutritious meal’.
One disappointed TD said: ‘It is a little like postponing Christmas for a week – but so long as it is being reopened we can manage that.’
The Dáil Bar is an independent world which, as the celebrated row involving John Deasy’s defiance of the smoking ban indicated, adapts to change slowly.
There will be no afternoon sessions either – with sources saying that availability will be confined to lunchtime and the early afternoon.
Despite the restrictions and the delays, some TDs and senators are believed to be more delighted about the restoration of their exclusive Dáil drinking facilities than the formation of a new government.
Sources told the MoS: ‘There was a bit more of a pep in a few steps on hearing about the disclosure. It was as though civilisation was coming back – though they will struggle, we suspect, with the new partitions.’
The Dáil Bar has declined in notoriety since the age of Bertie Ahern and Brian Cowen when there were often more members of the ‘bar lobby’ in the political pub than in the Dáil chamber. However, even in its reduced state, one source said: ‘It is missed, the Dáil Bar is normally a space for plotting.’
TDs, they added, ‘have been very dislocated by its absence and the absence of several other watering holes in the area’.
‘They have had to operate in the open instead of their usual snug.’
‘The Dáil Bar is normally a place for plotting’
Another TD said: ‘It is hard to know who has been more dislocated by coronavirus: the sea gulls wandering around the deserted streets of Dublin or our Dáil Bar-loving TDs and senators.
‘The younger TDs prefer the gym to the bar but for some of our longterm inmates it is a bit of a ShangriLa. It is the only place they feel safe in this world. It’s a sort of political sanctuary.’
One source said: ‘Some of the more elderly deputies were at the point of needing counselling.’
The Dáil Bar, they said: ‘Is a bit