YOU can throw a stone in any major city in Britain and hit an Irish pub with it, but perhaps not in your back yard. Until now, that is.
An innovative Galway man has taken the traditional Irish pub to the roads – and you can get one for yourself.
It started out as a hobby but now the Shebeen Irish pub has taken off for John Walsh.
His day job is his role at Clinical Cabinets, a company he founded 2011, but a Friday evening project for himself and his colleagues has turned into something much more than a pastime.
“It started out as a team building exercise,” John explains. “There was an old caravan I bought about two years ago and I came up with a design to turn it into a traditional Irish pub.”
Friday evenings when the day-to-day work was done turned into renovation sessions for the Clinical Cabinets team, as the Shebeen came to life.
Inside the novel Irish pub on wheelsThe process from start to finish took about six months to complete and modest John shares the credit with his colleagues.
“Most of the design work I did myself but my colleague here, Claire Finnegan, had a good bit of input. She came up with a lot of the interior design; where the bar would go in the caravan and the memorabilia and that so we worked hand in hand on it,” he said.
The seeds were sewn early on in the project that it could grow into something more than a team building exercise when the prototype was gaining attention by the day.
“There would be people calling all the time for our business and the Shebeen generated an awful lot of interest,” John explains. “So about three quarters of the way through we began to think it could become something more.”
The business is already rapidly expanding.
It has only been a few short weeks since the website was launched and John already has an order to ship over to the US.
A company in Boston has placed an order for one of the brilliant designs and the aim is to get it shipped over in time for Saint Patrick’s Day.
The original Shebeen pub is currently available for hire around Ireland but the wheels are in motion to get more and more of them built as the unlikely business continues to expand.
Overseas sales will be John’s main aim and he hopes to begin shipping to Britain next year.
“My main aim is to get six to eight of them built next year and get them overseas, to Britain, America, Europe and the likes,” he said. “It’s a unique product so it should travel well.”
While it may have begun as a hobby, the Shebeen looks certain to bring Irish pubs to every corner of the world.
See More: Shebeen Irish Pub
