A Pint of Plain: Tradition, Change, and the Fate of the Irish Pub [Hardcover]

Bill Barich (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 3, 2009

Seamlessly blending history and reportage, Bill Barich offers a heartfelt homage to the traditional Irish pub, and to the central piece of Irish culture disappearing along with it.

After meeting an I rishwoman in London and moving to Dublin, Bill Barich—a “blow-in,” or stranger, in Irish parlance—found himself looking for a traditional I rish pub to be his local. There are nearly twelve thousand pubs in Ireland, so he appeared to have plenty of choices. He wanted a pub like the one in John Ford’s classic movie, The Quiet Man, offering talk and drink with no distractions, but such pubs are now scare as publicans increasingly rely on flat-screen televisions, rock music, even Texas Hold ’Em to attract a dwindling clientele. For Barich, this signaled that something deeper was at play—an erosion of the essence of Ireland, perhaps without the Irish even being aware.

A Pint of Plain is Barich’s witty, deeply observant portrait of an Ireland vanishing before our eyes. Drawing on the wit and wisdom of Flann O’Brien (the title comes from one of his poems), James Joyce, Brendan Behan, and J. M. Synge, Barich explores how I rish culture has become a commodity for exports for such firms as the I rish Pub Company, which has built some five hundred “authentic” Irish pubs in forty-five countries, where “authenticity is in the eye of the beholder.” The tale of Arthur Guinness and the famous brewery he founded in the mid-eighteenth century reveals the astonishing fact that more stout is sold in Nigeria than in Ireland itself. While 85 percent of the I rish still stop by a pub at least once a month, strict drunk-driving laws have helped to kill business in rural areas. Even traditional I rish music, whose rich roots “connect the past to the present and close a circle,” is much less prominent in pub life. I ronically, while I rish pubs in the countryside are closing at the alarming rate of one per day, plastic I PC-type pubs are being born in foreign countries at the exact same rate.

From the famed watering holes of Dublin to tiny village pubs, Barich introduces a colorful array of characters, and, ever pursuing craic, the ineffable Irish word for a good time, engages in an unvarnished yet affectionate discussion about what it means to be Irish today.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Shhhhhh. . . . Don’t tell, but this is really a book about globalization, not about “yer only man” (i.e., the well-pulled pint of porter). With “Oirish” pubs cropping up in every burg and burb, what has happened to the originals? American emigrant Barich starts looking around his new neighborhood in Dublin for the pub of his dreams, where the pints are frothy and the conversation lofty. He finds the locals, both the pubs and their patrons, displaced by glamorous versions of themselves, and he discovers that he has unwittingly become part of a global plot to replace the real with the faux. He finally does find a few remaining magical places (once he gets out of Dublin, which for some readers will not be soon enough), but they are hanging-on-by-the-thumbnails operations in danger of going poof or pouf. Most browsers will pick this up because they want to read about Irish pubs, but they will get much, much more than they expected. An excellent, however sneaky, addition to the literature of globalization. --Patricia Monaghan

Review

“With scholarly rigor, he surveys the literature on the history of drinking, drunkenness and pubs before rewarding himself with the grueling and perilous fieldwork of sampling deeply from the 12,000 outposts in Ireland where alcohol is sold by the glass…Mr. Barich's picaresque meander through the Irish bloodstream is an entertaining survey of the culture and commerce of Ireland at a tremulous moment in its history…Fascinating.”

—William Birdthistle, Wall Street Journal

 

“Barich weaves a never-ending stream of oddly engaging historical and literary references into every dead end…Barich’s passion for boozy subjects is broad and undeniable. He’s equally at ease covering the effects of the temperance movement and introducing regional slang terms for being drunk.”

James Oliver Cury, New York Times Book Review

 

“The American writer Bill Barich moved to Ranelagh, on Dublin's south side, some time ago and set out to find the perfect Irish pub. A Pint of Plain: Tradition, Change, and the Fate of the Irish Pub is an engaging account of his quest and investigations.”

—Katherine A. Powers, Boston Globe

 

“Nicely researched, intelligently written, his book is a fun read tinged with melancholy at the thought of time passing and things changing; appropriately Irish, I think.”

—Laurie Hertzel, Minneapolis Star Tribune

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Walker & Company; 1ST edition (February 3, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802717012
• ISBN-13: 978-0802717016
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 6.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #929,797 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Fairytale Ireland" is nearly dead and gone, despite the Tourist Board, April 29, 2009

By 

John L Murphy "Fionnchú" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Pint of Plain: Tradition, Change, and the Fate of the Irish Pub (Hardcover)

"Drink is a good man's weakness." Proverbial wisdom Barich passes along during his personal and historical tour of Irish pubs. "Fairytale Ireland" may be marketed under the "Irish Pub Concept" pre-fab faux-antique corporate chains, as traditional pubs decline and decay under stricter drunk-driving laws. These in turn necessitated by the commuters ripping along (Barich estimates a fifteen-fold increase) rural roads as tract homes tear up fields for the Celtic Tiger's rapacious tail. And, such new residents don't frequent the "local," preferring their Carlsberg or Coors in cans from the logoed franchises that replace the family-run stores in the market towns overwhelmed by the blow-ins from the cities and all over the world.

So the cycle continues, and Long Island-born, California-residing Barich, now moved himself to Dublin, tells the tale of a slow death to civility, custom, and charm. About half his book takes place in Dublin, and he tells each chapter set there with grace and pace. He knows how to veer from his main story into anecdotes and byways before returning to his narrative, and this relation of his saga reflects well how a tale's told by a teller in a pub. He classifies the remaining pubs into trophy bars, pitched for tourists more than the neighbors and often based on their venerable status; pleasant but less distinguished corner houses; and corporate chains, which in Ireland appear to erase their "tradition" for a streamlined gentrification, even as abroad you find such enterprises as a hundred "Harrington & Sons" fake pubs saturating the Italian consumer.

Such globalization leads to Irish rejection of Guinness as an old man's heavy stout. Younger Irish follow their Anglo-American cousins in choosing more wine, and lighter German or American beers to quaff, often at home rather than in the company of those who at many pubs tend to be older, more insular, and stodgier. Younger Irish appear too to be suburban rather than urban in their tastes; immigrants replace the stereotypical publican, and such changes are more than cosmetic. They, for Barich, represent the decline of what Perry Share calls the "third place" of camaraderie outside home or work that the pub has long represented, the true public house.

The erosion of such ties for many Irish shows their fragmentation along Western lines as they retreat from the communal, village, farm-based culture into a sprawl of strip malls, semi-detached estates, and endless commutes far from the small towns where the suburbs now stretch to and supplant. Like farmers, publicans find few of the next generation willing to take on the intensive labor demanded to make a living.

"It's been said that a publican must be a democrat, an autocrat, an acrobat, and a doormat," Barich observes (21). He's good at summing up, in the second half, his encounters, or lack of such, in rural Ireland. Outside Sligo town, Barich finds one pub in the middle of a dark nowhere, a remnant of when the pub was also a house, and run by the family for the surrounding peasants. Three fellows hunch over the bar, "each in solitary contemplation of his jar. Their mood was desultory, as if a night at the pub was a dreary job they meant to quit as soon as they could." (163)

In Clonaslee in the Slieve Bloom mountains, bored teens in hoodies under a drizzle hunch too, too young to drink legally. Smoking, they slouch outside the supermarket. "Whenever an older boy wheeled by in a car and blew his horn, they roused themselves for a salute, pumping their fists and leaning hopefully toward the driver as they might toward a cherished vision of the future." (213) In this village, Barich also seems to stumble upon his Platonic vision of the type of pub such as Dublin's Brazen Head could never live up to. M. D. Hickey's stands, with four people inside the room the size of a walk-in closet. The true nature of the old pub, half-house, half-shebeen, here welcomes him with that elusive, however energetically marketed by the Tourist Board, hospitality that finds fewer givers and takers in these hectic, yuppified Irish times.

There were, perhaps it being hectic, a few slips in proofreading. "1852" for "1952" should mark one capital city pub's leasing. A "Vicentian" priest makes an off-stage appearance, while three times, "Malm Cross" gets a mention instead of "Maam" (or alternately "Maum") for the anglicization of the Irish toponym "Mám." Given Barich's ill-starred exploration of Cong of "The Quiet Man" fame or blame, it's puzzling how this error of that nearby place name would be tripled.

Otherwise, his scholarship's apparent if worn lightly; there's a list of his sources appended, but the very readable, brisk text moves free of footnotes. Barich does not end on any hokey epiphany that all will be well at the one last pub at the end of a rainbowed road. The historic identity that the pub stands for, the civility and communal bonds it fosters, now find themselves razed by generic retailers owned far away. Values corrode as "the local-- as in the particular, the unique-- was under siege, batted about the head by the insistently global." (235)

One example that causes controversy stands for the whole capitulation of Ireland to modernization. "The two-lane blacktops pressed into service as highways are a problem, but should Tara be threatened to correct it, simply to please the commuters?" (200) The destruction of the national heritage, the exfoliation of the island's greenbelt, the savaging of the landscape by lack of planning: these too despoil the image of Ireland the postcards and guidebooks persist in peddling, not to mention the ubiquitious Guinness-- now owned by an Italian distributor (along with Alpo pet food, Burger King, Pillsbury dough, and the pseudo-ethnic concoction, Haagen-Dazs).

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A warm glimpse into Irish drink and daily living, May 17, 2009

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Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Pint of Plain: Tradition, Change, and the Fate of the Irish Pub (Hardcover)

A PINT OF PLAIN: TRADITION, CHANGE AND THE FATE OF THE IRISH PUB arrived too late for St. Patrick's Day feature in our March issue but deserves a place in any general lending library strong in Irish history, culture and food and drink. After meeting an Irishwoman in London and moving to Dublin the author began seeking a traditional Irish pub to be 'his'. His search offers views of a bygone Ireland, modern Irish culture, blends in literary references, and offers a warm glimpse into Irish drink and daily living. Highly recommended.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars It's still Ireland...which is fine with me., November 28, 2010

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David Zelz "David Zelz" (Bangor, Maine United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Pint of Plain: Tradition, Change, and the Fate of the Irish Pub (Hardcover)

In a Pint of Plain, Bill Barich takes the reader with him as he searches for the "traditional" Irish pub in post Celtic Tiger Ireland. Weaving tales of some of Ireland's more colorful and notable pub dwellers and a discussion of the evolution of Ireland's pub culture into his urban and rural jaunt, the author is clearly disppointed with what he sees as an Ireland embracing a modernity that replaces what to him might have been a more charming past. At the end of the day, who's to say what defines "traditional"? I'm confident that Barich didn't draft his manuscript with a quill and that his search was not executed on horseback. So, as slick and contempory as it may have become, why begrudge an Ireland eager to embrace a higher standrard of living and an Ireland that is not content to be someone's museum piece? Why condemn smart and business savvy publicans who understand and respond to the wants and expectations of a changing clientele?

Shunning anything that runs afoul (read: television and recorded music) of his pub ideal and dismissing those shops that flirt with an atmosphere that might be defined as "traditional" by most standards as prepackaged, prefabricated, Ireland-by-Disney shlock, Barich seems more interested in simply finding a pub that suits him.

Opining on how Ireland's culture is being exported while concurrently being diluted at home, the author's search seems to be more a quixotic quest that has no more chance of success than a search for Waltons Mountain or Walnut Grove. Ultimately, what he is nostalgic for in the Irish pub is rooted in a time when Ireland suffered poverty, economic stagnation and an oppressive theocracy. Would he be content to assume that baggage as part of his desire for "tradition"?

Overall, A Pint of Plain is an enjoyable, fun read. I'm sure Mr. Barich's pub is out there somewhere. He may just have to go to the Bunratty Folk Park to find it. Or he could go to Tom Collins on Cecil Street in Limerick. I'd be interested in his opinion of that shop.