Kitsch Kitchen – Frank McNally on a Salthill institution, O’Connor’s Famous Pub

After the Galway Races recently, I spent a night in Salthill and, while there, had a couple of pints in O’Connor’s Famous Pub. For those of you unfamiliar with that establishment, the adjective is not mine. It’s the bar’s actual name.

But I had somehow never heard of the place until visiting it. Only then did I also learn that it was chief location for the 2018 video of Ed Sheeran’s Galway Girl, with Saoirse Ronan in the title role.

That three-minute blockbuster depicts a night of wild craic (altogether), in which a visiting Englishman falls gradually for an Irish cailín.

He falls for her more violently when a large man he spills drink on knocks him out. But – plot spoiler alert – it all ends happily, with the singer (played by Sheeran himself) waking up in the girl’s apartment.

Blowing a Gaskin – Frank McNally on gasconades, gasúns, and Ireland’s Bay of Naples

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In the long run – Alison Healy on the bizarre Olympic marathon of 1904

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Valour invalidated – Frank McNally on a mysterious Irish anti-hero: the “Great Gaiscí”

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Frank McNally on royal typos, Tennyson’s Tories, and the mystery of ‘Operation Sonnet’

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The video has attracted more than 600 million views on YouTube. So if O’Connor’s wasn’t famous before that, it is now.

But Sheeran’s song aside, the pub is also notable for what may be the biggest collection of Irish cultural kitsch I’ve ever seen in one place. The premises is covered, wall-to-ceiling, in bric-a-brac.

Thanks to the Races, it was also full of customers that night. So never mind a stool, it was a struggle to find something to lean against. In the end, I secured the corner of a typical mid-20th-century kitchen dresser, although I had to move ornaments to put my pint down.

Many Irish pubs have at least some of this stuff. A few are miniature museums of the genre. O’Connor’s, however, must be the Louvre.

The bar even has separately themed sections. There’s a nautical part, for example. There’s the usual vintage grocery. And including my dresser, there was also the interior of a typical Irish cottage, circa 1950, with long-johns drying on a line over the fireplace, overlooked by a picture of the Sacred Heart.

The floor, meanwhile, was sprinkled with sawdust, ostensibly to soak up spilled beer (and maybe sometimes blood, when Ed Sheeran bumps into you or starts singing).

The bric-a-brac has been added to O’Connor’s over many years, I gather, and the word “Famous” is a latter-day addition too. But long before YouTube videos, the business also had a claim to celebrity as – allegedly – Ireland’s first singing pub.

According to a 1964 feature in this newspaper, O’Connor’s “started a fashion of having singing, not only at night, but during the afternoons too.”

The practice has since infected an entire Galway suburb. Under the headline “Singing Salthill packs them in”, Cathal Óg O’Shannon reported: “Today if you stand in the main street you can hear opposition groups belting out songs and ballads in half a dozen houses.”

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The same day I was in Galway, by coincidence, I read an obituary in the London Times of a man who had taken the English version of old-style pub decoration and turned it into a multi-million-pound industry.

Michael Cannon (1938–2023) started in 1975 by owning half of a Bristol bar. Within a few years he had 16 full ones. By the 1990s, he was buying pubs all over Britain and doing them up to look old.

To this end, he kept a “giant warehouse in Staines, west of London, filled with stuffed fish and birds and other animals, hunting mirrors and memorabilia . . .”.

His team would arrive at 7am somewhere and by day’s end would have completely redesigned the premises, complete with “an eye-catching if meaningless new name such as the Rat and Parrot or the Pickled Newt.”

Cannon’s work attracted scorn from the aesthetic equivalents of the Campaign for Real Ale:

“Critics carped at what they claimed was a bland and uniform fake traditionalism that had little to do with the pubs’ individual identity or history.” But this didn’t affect his bottom line. Various sales of the revamped bars earned him £170 million.

O’Connor’s, by contrast, is a family business, now in its third generation of ownership, and with a real name still mercifully free of rats, parrots, or pickled newts.

And authentic or not, its vintage fittings have been personally curated over decades.

They’re part of the pub’s identity now. For sheer exuberance, the collection might even be unique.

As for the Galway Girl video, a bit like the ceramic dogs on my dresser, it and O’Connor’s seem to have been a perfect match.

That song was a combination of his lyrics and an existing tune by the Irish traditional band Beoga, who play on it.

And of course, it had a title that was already famous from a different song by Steve Earle.

So, speaking of bric-a-brac collectors, Sheeran may be one himself.