JOHNNY GRANVILLE: After an absence of nearly two centuries, Irish people began to settle again in Paris in some numbers in the 1980s, reconnecting in the process with a very old tradition.
The new Irish in Paris were not only the soldiers, scholars and priests described by Pádraic Colum in his famous poem about the Irish College, itself thriving again after all the years. They were not all middle-class migrants with a B.A. in French in their back pockets either. The construction workers of Euro Disney were there, as well as the language teachers, the au pairs, the IT specialists, the political and sexual exiles and the hopeful spirits who arrived seeking romance or adventure. They soon made themselves at home. And they brought their own habits and customs with them, including the pub.
The Irish pub in continental Europe has become such an ubiquitous phenomenon that is it easy to forget how recent a trend this is. Like the Irish themselves, such places were rare in the early 1980s. Paris had a mere handful. Apart from better-known and brasher establishments which catered for a clientele of visiting rugby supporters and expatriate English-speakers, one small place stood out like a beacon, as fiercely independent and unchanging as the Skelligs.
Tigh Johnny, at 55 Rue de Montmartre in the heart of Paris, was a home from home for a generation of newly arrived Irish. Johnny was Johnny Granville, from Feothanach in the West Kerry Gaeltacht of Corca Dhuibne. Unlike many Irish pubs in English-speaking cities, Tigh Johnny's was never a ghetto where Irish people went to escape from the locals. Rather, it was a bridge connecting to a kaleidoscope of parallel but interconnected worlds, peoples and cultures. It was where a loyalist from the Shankill Road could feel at home. It was where young Irish women and men, not long off the plane but soon clumsily competent in French, brought their newly acquired French, Breton or other friends. It was home to poetry readings, music sessions, political arguments.
Like many other Irish pubs, it was a place were you could hear about jobs and accommodation, but you could also meet people of French, Breton, English, American, Algerian and a host of other nationalities. The musicians from the Auvergne who happened by one night were welcomed with open arms, initially in the mistaken belief that they were Breton. They became a popular fixture. Visitors from Ireland, including barristers, poets, academics and journalists, found their way to the place. Class, colour, sexual orientation, politics and religion played no part.
What was special about Tigh Johnny? In a word, Johnny. A warm and talented man who learned to fly before going into the pub business, he was shy and self-effacing, but had an extraordinary capacity for empathy and friendship.
An intensely private person who did not wish to be judged by anyone, he did not judge others either. He loved Paris with a passion and had an eclectic and unusual collection of French friends and acquaintances, from local firemen to politicians, yet he always yearned for home. A native Irish speaker, he was the main mover behind the re-launching of Conradh na Gaeilge in Paris after an gap of 70 years. His politics, linguistic and otherwise, were personal and extraordinarily tolerant. A night owl, he liked nothing more than to wander through Paris with friends after his own place closed, taking in other pubs, late-night dance spots and early morning restaurants.
I met him by chance in the mid-1990s, after an absence of a couple of years, on the day his pub closed for the last time. He stood in the empty room, calm and resigned; it was time to move on. Soon he would be back in Ireland, where he opened a small café in Dingle. Sadly, he was to have an untimely death from cancer, aged only 48.
Johnny was so naturally modest and self-effacing that he probably never realised his own pivotal role in underpinning the development of a new Irish community in Paris. Today the Irish are part of the Parisian landscape, confident, capable and settled. But those who came at that moment of change, back in the 1980s, will remember Tigh Johnny, and his own quiet, enabling presence.
P.M.E.