WHAT’S happening to the pub?
Over the last twenty years more than 2,000 pubs have closed. Here in Ireland. A country so synonymous with pub culture that we exported the very idea of an ‘Irish’ pub across the globe.
And these bare statistics are a very real thing.
From where I’m writing this right now a two-minute drive in opposite directions would once have taken me to a choice of three rural pubs.
There’s now one.
Pubs in Ireland are closing and that is a big change in the very nature of Irish life.
Of course, health advisers might see this as a good thing but that seems to confuse the pub simply with alcohol. The pub is more than that. The pub is a mirror of society.
Now it might seem ridiculous to say that but I’ve always been a fan of the pub and I’ve always seen it as more than the pint in your hand.
To paraphrase Brendan Behan, I like the pub because I like people. Or in my case I particularly like listening to people talking and in the pub that talk is often of the most fantastical nature.
Of course, the pints feature but if it was just about that we’d only have off licences, wouldn’t we? And if the pub wasn’t some kind of mirror of Irish society why do we try so hard to sell tourists the pub as an essential experience?
As to why the pubs are closing, well, there must be, in all honesty, many reasons as these things tend to be complicated.
Two seem to jump out to me though. One is just a personal experience. In the closest town to where I am, a small rural town, there was a pub that I loved to frequent. It had a long counter and a fireplace and was a great place for a pint.
When I was last in there the television that was on for sporting events had now become two screens continually on with the noise turned down.
There was a radio playing loudly and it had gone from being a great place for a pint to a place that was an assault on the senses.
Now, perhaps, I’m suddenly an old man with old man’s complaints but it seemed the pub had decided it needed modernising and so was introducing things like televisions just in case there was someone who didn’t have one at home and thought a treat would be to watch two. While listening to the radio.
This Americanisation of our shared spaces, our public houses, actually destroys what the pub is supposed to be. So why would you go there — to watch the telly?
To watch the news or a soap opera or a ticker tape sports news channel? Would you not just stay at home in a much more comfortable seat to do that? And is that perhaps what people are doing? If the pub is not really the pub anymore then why go to it?
But it’s possible it’s something much more socially profound. There has been a lot of talk that we are all much more socially isolated than we ever were.
A report in 2022 claimed Ireland was the loneliest country in Europe. The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre conducted the first EU-wide survey on loneliness, which found that over 20% of respondents in Ireland reported feeling lonely most or all of the time—significantly higher than the EU average of 13%.
It seems unlikely those figures have changed much in the intervening years.
This statistic is astonishing in a country that prides itself on its friendliness and the art of having the craic.
We might appear on the surface more connected than ever, with many people constantly updating every aspect of their lives to people on social media, and we certainly seem to be one of the most photographed populations there has ever been. B
ut are we lonely as well?
Bertie Ahern was talking about this nearly twenty years ago. The idea that with all our advancements and all our communications that we were, in fact, getting more distant from each other.
Many people have talked about this in relation to the pub. How the pub is a meeting place, a gathering centre in a community, how it is about much more than the drink.
That it is one of the few places that is a refuge for isolated people.
So, if the pubs are closing is it because we are no longer meeting up, no longer gathering together. Have we given up? Surrendered to our loneliness.
Are we at home now, in Cork or Kerry or Donegal, in front of our outsized televisions, sipping a glass of wine, looking at photographs of other people’s nights out.
Is it that the pub we would have gone to is closed or that the pub isn’t really the pub anymore? Does anyone know? I think I’ll go for a pint.
