A portrait of the artist as a pub inspector

Never mind naming naval ships after him. An even more dubious tribute to James Joyce’s memory is the rash of plaques on licensed premises all over the country in which his likeness is used to promote the concept of the “authentic Irish pub”.

The vague implication of these outrages is that the father of modern literature was also a part-time bar inspector – concerned with ensuring that snugs and other fittings met industry standards.

There might be some excuse for this if it were confined to Dublin. After all, he did write about that city a lot, albeit from a safe distance. And the plaques include his throwaway line in Ulysses that a "good puzzle would be to cross Dublin without passing a pub".

But the promoters of the scheme didn’t want to confine it to the city, obviously. Instead, the plaques are countrywide. So where necessary, the quotation is simply bowdlerised, with “Ireland” inserted in place of “Dublin”.

If Joyce is in purgatory somewhere, it's things like this that must be torturing him. To paraphrase Myles na gCopaleen, the poor man has suffered enough down the years from people putting the apostrophe in Finnegans Wake. The plaques must be turning him on a spit, altogether.

Even apart from the ethics of it, the altered quotation is a nonsense. It would be no puzzle at all to cross Ireland without passing a pub. If you use the motorways, you’d be lucky to pass a petrol station, never mind a place where humans can fill up.

Alternatively, travelling on foot, you could easily plot a pub-free route by starting somewhere south of Bray and proceeding westwards via the mountains, the Bog of Allen, and the Fields of Athenry, taking care only to avoid surfaces with tarmac.

As for notion of pubs being authentically Irish, I saw the Joyce plaque most recently on a famous establishment in Kerry – Kruger’s of Dunquin – and the contrast between that premises and the ones similarly honoured in Dublin could not have been more drastic.

I don’t know what the old Kruger’s was like, when the man himself was still around. But the pub underwent major renovation in the 1980s.

It’s now devoid of any aesthetic or architectural charm. And yes, that itself is an authentic feature of many Irish bars – of most Irish towns too – but I hardly think the plaque awarders intended such a back-handed compliment. (In fairness, the day I passed through, at around 11am, the bar was also devoid of customers, so even Joyce might have struggled to imagine the atmosphere when there’s a crowd in.)

Kruger’s is described in the local tourist literature as “Europe’s most westerly pub”, which I suppose must be true. So it would be a tragedy if, inspired by the Joycean misquotation, you attempted an alcohol-free crossing of Ireland, ending with the Dingle peninsula, only to fall at the last hurdle. But of course it would serve you right.

While I was at it, during my Kerry sojourn, I also inspected a few of Dingle’s bars. And although I didn’t notice any Joycean plaques, I did find myself pondering their varying degrees of authenticity as well.

It was amusing to read somewhere about an insult the actor Trevor Howard once made to the town. Back in London, after filming Ryan's Daughter, he told the News of the World how miserable he had been in Dingle, with its lack of social outlets, apart from "52 of those grocer's shop places that serve pints of Guinness".

Nowadays, we tend to consider the shop-cum-pub as a charming vestige of the real Ireland. And whether Dingle ever had 52 of them (Howard’s estimate was vehemently disputed at the time), there are not many left now. Moreover, those that remain tend to have a preserved, museum-like quality. The town’s best-known hybrid is Dick Mack’s – bar on one side, cobbler’s on the other. But they haven’t done any actual cobbling since about 1999. The old shoes are only decorative now.

On the other hand, I also stopped into Foxy John’s one night and had a pint while sitting at the hardware counter. It being about 9pm, that too was unstaffed, and somewhat forlorn. Then a woman came in and asked for something at the bar opposite, to be told that they weren’t sure they had any, but they’d check.

I presumed she’d ordered a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, or some such thing. Instead, the man came back with what appeared to be a car battery. “We had one left,” he said. The customer went home happy, and I thought to myself – that’s authentic.

@FrankmcnallyIT

fmcnally@irishtimes.com