Every year, for our wedding anniversary, myself and Herself stay the night in a nice hotel in Dublin city centre and go out for dinner: a different one each time. This year it was an expensive place that’s part of a foreign-owned chain. It was grand, we agreed: in the Hiberno-English sense where grand means underwhelming. A bit corporate, a bit soulless. It could have been anywhere.
Afterwards, we stopped off for a drink in the main bar of the Shelbourne Hotel, where the aesthetic and atmosphere were similar to the restaurant. The only Irish people there seemed to be us and the waiting staff. The rest were mostly Americans, pretending to enjoy Guinness.
Before the Shelbourne was bought and tarted up, this bar was one of the few places you could get a seat on a Friday night. It had a distinct sense of faded, old Dublin grandeur; even a hint of sadness. The seats didn’t match and were a bit tatty. The floor was badly scuffed and scratched. It often seemed like some of the customers were there just to shelter from the rain.
It was great.
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It’s far from the only place I can think of in Dublin city centre that has disappeared over the past few years, to be replaced by a boxy hotel or a bar that seems to be constructed from a flat pack. Sometimes they ape the old-fashioned pubs, or they give it a zany name or pretend the place has a “story”. It’s all facade, of course: an attempt to distract from their vanilla similarity. The number of pubs in Dublin (and elsewhere) which aren’t dominated by thumping music or a TV screen, where people go simply to talk to each other, seems to be decreasing by the week.
You may be saddened by this homogenisation. Or you may say: that’s life, deal with it, Grandpa. Plenty of people like these new places. Both statements are true. I can’t prove that the bars I remember were better, only that I preferred them.
There is a human tendency to believe that things were better in the past. Not just in relation to pubs, but life in general. Repeated surveys across multiple countries have consistently found that a majority of people feel life was better decades ago; or, to put it another way, that the world is getting worse. It’s an idea which has found growing political expression all over the planet. In Ireland some of the nationalist micro-parties tout a return to no immigrants, no divorce or abortion or LGBT rights, as well as leaving the EU: which would, in temporal terms, locate us at about 1970.
Yet, in as far as it’s possible to quantify “worse” or “better”, things have got better in Ireland and across the world since that year. Infant and maternal mortality rates have reduced. Rates of poverty have gone down. We are better fed, we live longer. Our children are better educated and safer.
So why doesn’t it feel better? Partially because the media, both mainstream and online, tends to stress the negative, reinforcing a cultural mindset that optimism is naive. Partially because, as things have improved, our expectations are (rightly) higher. But mostly because the experience of progress is more individual than general. If you’re living in poverty or you can’t find a place to live in 2024, a bar chart showing how things have improved over the past five decades isn’t going to solve your problems or make you feel better.
It’s the old problem of bringing nuance into public debate, of entertaining two apparently contradictory ideas at the same time: just because we’ve made progress, doesn’t mean we don’t have the right to loudly complain. It’s the kind of thing you could have a quiet conversation about in a pub. If there were any quiet pubs left.