2,903 words

The last time I was in Ireland, a little under a year ago now, I made it a point to avoid Dublin. I don’t say this to offend any Dubs. The main reason I didn’t want to set foot Dublin is because I didn’t want to see how bad things have got in the “fair city”. I’m not really fond of big cities, generally, but many years ago, I spent quite a lot of time in Dublin and I did grow fond of the place. Unfortunately, I know that Dublin has not been spared the fate that so many European capitals and major cites (and minor ones too) have already suffered. In fact, Dublin, like the rest of Ireland, is arguably suffering this same fate in a faster, crueller way than its counterparts. Last year, just before my scheduled arrival in Ireland, there was a spate of stabbings and rapes in the country, most of which occurred in Dublin. I couldn’t bear the thought of seeing what the city’s become.

In the end it was a futile attempt to shield my soul. One has to pass through a major city at some point (that’s where the airports are, after all), and I ended up spending two days in Cork, another city I spent a lot of time in long ago and of which I have fond memories. Such was the assault on my senses and sensibilities that at one point while walking along the high street, I had to turn to the missus and suggest we just go back to the hostel. From the Penneys on Saint Patrick’s Street with its massive posters of a black family dressed up in Christmas pyjamas, to the buskers on corners waving Palestinian flags and singing the billionth terrible rendition of “Zombie”, to the overwhelming sense that there were no more Irish people in the city–not even in the areas far from the tourist zones–it all just became a bit too much for me.

Given how much seeing the changes in Cork affected me, I suppose I’m grateful that I didn’t go to Dublin. It would have been even worse. Especially because had I gone there, I would have immediately headed straight for my favourite Dublin watering hole, Hughes Pub, only to have been crushed upon discovering that Hughes is no more. Instead, I found out that the pub had closed while sat on board a transatlantic Aer Lingus flight.

I really do get the feeling that the world has passed me by. It’s fine, I sort of let it, but it does create some moments of disorientation and surprises, sometimes pleasant ones…often unpleasant ones. I hadn’t flown a “long haul” in quite a while, so I was surprised to discover that all the seats now had screens on the back of them beaming a vast array of distractions and entertainment right into the passengers’ eyeballs from a distance of a few inches. And it was all free! For the first couple hours of the flight, I had no interest in watching any of the films, and there was an astonishing number to choose from. Even as all the screens around me were lit up with explosions, cartoons with flashing neon colours, and, rather awkward, sex scenes, I stoically ignored the black square in front of my face. Eventually, however, out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of a passenger scrolling through the library of films to choose from and I spied Brendan Gleeson’s big bearded mug on something called Farewell to Hughes. That got my attention.

Strangely, I instantly knew what the title was referring to, what the film would be about…but I didn’t want it to be true. I told myself it couldn’t be. But there was no getting around it. My heart sank and my brow furrowed. Farewell to Hughes was about Hughes Pub, and Hughes Pub has closed.

“Everybody’s Changing and I Don’t Feel the Same”

Why would they make a film about a pub? Well, Hughes wasn’t just “a pub”. Not in these days.

Another reason why I don’t like big cities is that they are all so much the same now. There’s hardly anything to separate them, apart from a few historic and unique monuments. All major cities today, Dublin included, are chock full of the same multinational shops, the same American fast-food joints, the same nondescript steel and glass canyons, the same “diverse” people wearing the same uniform of hoodies and jeans or, if they’re female, skin-tight spandex bottoms. That the most unathletic people persist in wearing athletic apparel is one of modernity’s cruellest tortures.

Pubs have not fared any better in the face of this global conformity. So many pubs across Ireland and Britain are now soulless, cheerless, boring haunts. Even the small pubs in small towns. Attempting to imitate the pubs of old which these new upstart pubs have replaced, they all end up featuring the same kitschy design, the same “vintage” Guinness posters that can be found in every tourist shop are in every faux old-fashioned pub. These decorations are a small mercy compared to the modern tat. Old pubs had paintings and books on the walls. Today’s pubs are festooned in strings with little green triangles bearing the Heineken logo and other corporate sponsored crap, almost always featuring images of a black male/white female couple laughing it up. I wonder if 70 years from now, the pubs of the future will even bother trying to imitate the interior design of pubs in the 2000s. Actually, I wonder if 70 years from now, there will be pubs at all.

Provincial and national governments are smothering pub owners and pub goers with suffocating restrictions, making it all the more difficult for the auld pubs to get by. Many of them can’t, so one by one, they’re starting to fade away. The cost of a pint, too, is simply outrageous. I’ve heard it said, and experience has often proven it true, that Irish beer and whiskey is more expensive in Ireland than it is outside of it.

Another reason, in my opinion: television. No, not people staying at home to watch television. Television inside the pub. I don’t live in Ireland so I don’t know for how long this has been going on, but during my last trip to Ireland I don’t think I stepped into a single pub that did not have at least one television screen clinging to a wall or perched on a shelf.

Like Gandalf in Moria, when I was last in Ireland I realized that I had no memory of this place. In my mind, I still see myself sat in pubs where there are no televisions, certainly not multiple giant televisions with English Premier League football and RTÉ news on full blast. The pubs I remember were smokey, creaky, maybe even musty. The only noise came from the people inside. If there was music, it didn’t come from a loudspeaker behind the bar blaring out the Top 40 hits from America. It came from musicians in the corner having a session. Granted, I looked for these kinds of pubs specifically, and while I know that sports bars and the like have been ever-present for ages now, and the pubs have been becoming more like the franchise bars in America with their plethora of screens and loud piped music, nevertheless I was still taken aback by how even modest, antiquated pubs had one or two TVs switched on.

Hughes Pub was not like these modern desecrations. Hughes was a remnant from the old school. Groaning wooden floors, colored glass windows, no televisions, and musicians playing tunes. When I was a young man sojourning in Dublin, I spent many a day and night in Hughes. I spent so much time there that when I returned to Dublin in 2017, the owner Michael Hughes, who ran the pub and tended the bar until his death, said he recognized me. Perhaps he was just humoring me.

The Hughes family put their name to the pub in 1953, when Michael’s father, Martin, bought it. It stood on Chancery Street, next to the Four Courts. Many who came to sip a pint or two or have a bite to eat were barristers, solicitors, maybe even defendants! One quiet night, I was sitting at a low table near the bar, writing in a journal, when one such solicitor walked up to me and said, “May I ask what you’re writing?” We ended up having a brilliant little chat and became friends, frequently meeting up at Hughes.

As I lingered in Dublin town, I brought dates to Hughes. It was a great place to test a girl. If she dug the place, excellent sign. If she found it odd or boring, no need to waste time on more dates. As it did for so many others, Hughes Pub became my little escape route to a bygone world, a world where people were trusting and trustworthy, interesting and witty, where fiddlers and pipers cast musical magic spells, and the pints were poured properly.

One such person to whom Hughes meant a great deal is the actor Brendan Gleeson. Apparently, the place meant so much to him that he agreed to star in a little documentary dedicated to it. I say “apparently” because I really don’t know how often Gleeson darkened Hughes’s door, nor how much he really cared about the pub.

Clocking it at only an hour long, it’s a very touching bit of nostalgia and a charming goodbye not only to Hughes Pub, but also to Michael Hughes, who died in 2019, and to a part of Irish culture that is slowly dying out. Gleeson is our companion as we meet the musicians who used to play at the pub, and other members of the Hughes family take us back in time to the pub’s early days. Almost all of them, Gleeson included, talk about the importance of such a place; a place where skilled musicians played Irish tunes live, where there was dancing and sociability, where there was, in a word, craic. Almost all of them express a sadness that pubs like Hughes are struggling, becoming a thing of the past. Gleeson listens and nods, agrees, and, being a fairly decent musician himself, joins in a few last sessions to serenade the hallowed ground of the pub.

And yet, I wonder how much Gleeson really cares. This is a man who has some rather questionable opinions about the state of Ireland right now. As reported by RTÉ, Gleeson doesn’t think the massive and rapid population changes taking place in Ireland are such a big deal. “I would look to people to encourage and allow the more creative, positive, kinder instincts to prosper,” he has stated.

“If Ireland wants to stay more of the Ireland of the welcomes and less of Ireland of the division, I think you invest in the people. That’s what you do. By the way, my situation with people going out to particular areas, my idea is that if you are bringing a second child home to a first child, getting a new brother, new sister, you bring a little present. You make the first child feel enriched, not impoverished. It’s not ‘you’re out the window’… you bring the first child into it.”

Speaking to the Irish Independent, Gleeson had this to say: “We are essentially the United States of America now, a place where people come to find prosperity, opportunity — to find life. OK, we haven’t coped with it.” In Gleeson’s view, it’s the Irish who are at fault, who bear the blame, for the miserable consequences of the Irish government’s immigration policy. Irish folk simply “haven’t coped” well enough with all the stabbings, rapes, and murders committed by foreign gypsies and migrants from Africa and the Middle East.

The Independent interview continues:

Last week he went for a walk at Malahide Castle, near where he lives, and had a realisation.

“I was thinking, this used to belong to one person. It belongs now to a whole plethora of people,” he says.

“The people who mostly use it a lot of the time are the foreigners who’ve come over here, and are working here and living here. They love all the public spaces. They access the things that we in Ireland don’t. In Ireland now, we have to start bending it around to what makes people happy.”

Here, Gleeson is saying openly that foreigners get access to public spaces, that Irish heritage is now being offered to “a whole plethora of people”, and that Ireland needs to start doing whatever makes these foreigners happy.

His conversation with the Irish Independent finally concludes with these words:

There is so much vibrancy now in Ireland. We have a kind of amazing prosperity. Who knows, it might be over next week, but I think we have to start building towards a population of 10 million.

We have to start seeing ourselves differently — as a place where we benefited for years from going over to the States, or even to England where there was a booming economy and a need for workers.

We have this coming to us now. I think it justifies the need for nationhood. I think it justifies all the stuff that we felt was a duty to some sort of a heritage. To me, it’s: ‘Look how far we’ve come.’ It’s a wonderful place, throbbing with opportunity.

And don’t forget that we have little gems like Irish music.

I know that actors aren’t renowned for having the most profound opinions on politics and society (although they certainly believe they are), but by God, there is just so much inane babble in those statements. Brendan Gleeson doesn’t come across as one of Hollywood’s vapid line-readers, yet here he sounds about as intelligent, and as womanly, as Taylor Swift.

He thinks Ireland benefitted by losing generations to emigration to America, when in reality Ireland is the only European country whose population today is lower than it was before the industrial revolution. He seems to agree with those who deem Ireland’s small population a bad thing, so he’s fully on board with Project Ireland 2040 and its solution to Ireland’s supposed population woes: augment Ireland’s population to 10 million people through mass immigration, even though he thinks the Irish “haven’t coped” with the already unprecedented number of migrants arriving in the country. I’m sure taking in several millions more over the course of a few years will be much easier to cope with. Right, Brendan?

This is why I found Gleeson’s appearance in Farewell to Hughes so insincere. There he is plucking away on his banjo, joining in the eulogies to this symbol of traditional Irish culture, but catch him in a different context and he’ll sing a different tune. He’ll gush about the “vibrancy” of this new Ireland, he’ll urge the Irish to “see themselves differently” and welcome in millions of people from all over the world, and then he’ll give you a little wink and nudge, “we still have Irish music, eh?” Do you, Brendan? You just made a bloody film about how it’s dying. Do you think swarming the country with 5 million Somalis, Afghans, Indians, and Nigerians is going to help or harm Irish music? I’m sure Gleeson probably thinks that the Afghans and Nigerians will take up the fiddle and carry the torch. They’ll learn Irish music and they’ll make it better, because everything magic migrants do while wearing Irishface is better than the way old stodgy Irish people do it.

This is the eternal frustration with luvvie liberals, especially the ones in Ireland. All the things they claim to care about: diversity, culture, community, safety, wellbeing, are put into existential jeopardy by their very own ideals and policies. In his ramble, Gleeson even found a way to shoehorn in nationhood. What “nationhood”?

Hughes Pub is gone. One less place where a young lad can sit on a given night, sip a pint, and enjoy some quiet or be carried off on the wings of timeless tunes. One less place where musicians can gather and play together. One less place where folk can meet, gossip, debate, and dissent.

Places like Hughes are getting replaced with Nando’s, “street food” dumps, Turkish barbers, vape shops, and sports bars with half a dozen televisions. This is “vibrant” Ireland?

The Irish people are getting replaced. The Irish birth rate is at around 1.7. Ireland is one of the most expensive countries to live in in all of Europe, and by some metrics it is the most expensive. Young Irish feel condemned to leave the country, seeing no opportunity for themselves to ever own a house, earn a decent living, or merely get to the end of the month in the face of a skyrocketing cost of living crisis. And the hateful Irish government’s reaction to the mess they’ve made is simply to import a new population into Ireland that will prop up the pyramid scheme. But sure, Dublin’s skyline is covered in cranes, Google’s made its nest, and the roads are nicer. This is the “amazing prosperity” Gleeson and other Irish progressives speak of. Well then, I agree with venerable Irish journalist and nationalist, John Waters: give us back the bad roads.

Brendan Gleeson was right about one thing: Ireland is essentially the United States of America now, but in a way he doesn’t understand.