Come Here To Me!

Paddy O’Brien at work in McDaid’s, from Bord Fáilte Archive, Dublin City Council collections.

John Ryan’s memoir Remembering How We Stood may be the most battered book on my bookshelf, which is a remarkable achievement in itself. It has the tea cup stains,  dog-eared pages and the scrawled notes of a truly loved and enjoyed book. It is, in essence, the tale of a man who went to an auction to buy an electric toaster and came back an accidental publican. Ryan was infinitely more than that, and as an artist, publisher, broadcaster and critic he left a fine legacy of work behind. His memoir is packed full of little gems like this:

 A man I knew was taking a stroll down Grafton Street one day when he happened to overhear part of a discussion which three citizens were having outside Mitchell’s Café. The gist of their dialogue was that they were deploring the absence from the Dublin scene of any real ‘characters’. They appeared to be genuinely aggrieved. They were, in fact, Myles na gCopaleen, Seán O’Sullivan and Brendan Behan.

Ryan’s pub, The Bailey, became a central part of the literary scene of Dublin in the second half of the 1950s and into the following decade. Still, there was one public house that was head and shoulders above them all for literary appeal, and that was McDaid’s of Harry Street. In the words of Brendan Behan’s finest biographer, Michael O’Sullivan, it was quite simply “Dublin’s literary Mecca.”

Central to the appeal of the pub was its head barman, Paddy O’Brien. Still fondly remembered in Dublin’s public houses today, O’Brien pulled pints in McDaid’s from 1937 until his departure for the nearby Grogan’s on South William Street, which played no small role in giving the later a literary reputation that continues to this very day. A Dubliner of Meath stock, O’Brien answered an advertisement for a pub job in his early 20s, beginning a career that would span decades.

In the important Kevin C. Kearns oral history Dublin Pub Life and Lore, O’Brien recalled the McDaid’s of the 1930s as a pub that “was nothing at all. It was a dreadful place. Just an ordinary pub with snugs and little partitions and sawdust and spittoons.” To his mind, Davy Byrne’s was then the only true literary public house in the capital. In trying to pinpoint the moment at which McDaid’s began attracting a literary clientele, O’Brien pointed towards the arrival of John Ryan as a regular. In Ryan’s own words, “in those days I published Envoy and people would come into McDaid’s who were seeking me out….There’d be Behan, who was a marvelous stage filler, and Kavanagh and O’Nolan and Donleavy and Tony Cronin. And Liam O’Flaherty was there quite a lot. Quite regularly you’d see five of them together there.”

A young Anthony Cronin, Enniscorthy-born and carving out a name as a poet in literary Dublin, quickly fell for McDaid’s, remembering that “McDaid’s was never merely a literary pub. Its strength was always in the variety of talent, class, caste and estate. The divisions between writer and non-writer, bohemian and artist, informer and revolutionary, male and female, were never rigorously enforced; and nearly everyone, gurriers included, was ready for elevation, to Parnassus, the scaffold or wherever.” Visitors fell for it too; the Irish American hippy Emmett Grogan, so central to the Summer of Love that took San Francisco by storm, recalled in his autobiography (written in third person):

He liked the saloon with its high ceiling, scattered tables and solid wooden bar. It was a big, funky room and the only decor was the people in it. They were very hearthy and whether they were laughing or arguing, discussing or pontificating, they were enjoying themselves and each other. They weren’t dressed up to impress anybody.

In folk memory, the characters of literary Dublin become two dimensional, remembered as heavy drinkers who reveled in each others company. In reality, there were often very real tensions between the men. Writing in the 1980s, Seán Dunne rightly decried the “attitude which finds writers easy to handle as anecdotes but not as artists”, and which overlooks much of the difficulties of the much romanticised 1950s in Dublin public houses. Sometimes, tensions were no doubt motivated by professional jealously and circumstance at any moment in time. In an interview with the Evening Herald in the 1980s, O’Brien recalled how:

Myles (Flann O’Brien) would arrive at the same time every day, half past one, dressed in the same coat and hat…When the ball of malt was set in front of him he’d turn to Kavanagh at the end of the counter and ask ‘Are you buying me that?’ Kavanagh would give him a dirty look and Myes would remark: ‘You mean Monaghan bastard.’

The ability of O’Brien to calm men and tempers was central to his popularity as a barman. Different public houses in the city, as today, had their own regular clientele, who debated the issues of the day, sometimes to a bizarrely localised extent. The poet Louis MacNeice recalled on the eve of World War Two how he “spent Saturday drinking in a bar with the Dublin literati; they hardly mentioned the war but debated the correct versions o fDublin street songs.” The Palace on Fleet Street, like McDaid’s, had its own impressive crew that included diverse faces like Irish Times editor R.M Smylie, the sculptor Jerome Connor, artist Harry Kernoff and the occasional radical like Cathal O’Sullivan and Leslie Daiken. On occasion, people drifted from one milieu into the next. The curious mix of IRA veterans, young poets and aging writers that took McDaid’s to their heart was beautifully described by Ryan as being comprised of “Grafton Street boulevardiers and the MacDaidian intelligentsia.” In O’Brien’s own words, he was not part of such scenes, but he was respected among them.

Anthony Cronin, John Ryan and Paddy Kavanagh, all centrally important to the story of McDaid’s in the days of Paddy O’Brien (National Library of Ireland)

The end for O’Brien and McDaid’s came in 1972. When the pub was put up for sale, O’Brien bid for it with the financial support of another man. No Dublin publican would oppose him, but the pub was sold to an outside bidder; “so that was the end of me. And all the other city publicans having nothing to do with it, and me thinking I have the whole field to meself…and then out of the blue.”

As if by fate, 1972 witnessed the purchasing of Grogan’s on the nearby South William Street by Tommy Smith and Paddy Kennedy. Smith told Kearns in his oral history collection that he informed O’Brien immediately that “there’ll be a job for you over with us if you want it.” He did, and with it came an exodus of writers from one watering hole to another, beautifully described by one contemporary as a ship deserting the rats. Grogan’s claimed a literary and artistic set that included Liam O’Flaherty, Kathleen Behan, Tony Cronin, Aidan Murphy and others, while characters as diverse as Michael Hartnett, John Jordan and others also settled into one of the only boozers in the city that can today claim to be a true literary pub. Like the McDaid’s of O’Brien’s day, the magic perhaps lay in the diversity of clientele, with a similar mix of republican, artistic and bohemian types. O’Brien worked the bar there until his death in 1989, with Smith recalling that “Paddy hopped around at 72 years of age the day before he died.” The obituaries were kind, with the Irish Examiner remembering him as someone who “brought to his vocation the quality of listener, friend, amanuensis and comforter for countless customers… Wherever he is now, he won’t be stuck for company.”