Close your eyes and imagine. It’s 10:30 PM. A damp Friday night. The once bustling Pav steps have become a sparse coalition of the most committed dregs. Amongst these poor souls, that inescapable, omnipotent question is about to come up. The next course of action, the subsequent move, the PPP (the Post-Pav Plan). Stares and silence, until some brave sod eventually mutters “…Doyles?” No one even tries to stop it. 

After a delirious trudge from the Pav to Front Square, eventually you greet that hellish black and red exterior. You can’t help but wonder how you ended up here. Again. Why does it feel inevitable? Next week will be different, you tell yourself emphatically. But really, you’re not quite so sure it will be…

Many Trinity students will attest that Doyles is an institution truly impossible to avoid throughout one’s social life as a student. On late evenings, Doyles is transfigured from an old style bar to student locale, its floors alive with students from Freshers to Sophisters, hailing from the Hamilton to the Arts Block. Every week some society I didn’t know existed seems to be doing a pub quiz upstairs, karaoke in the basement, or having a godforsaken afters wherever there’s space to squeeze. 

Doyle’s internet presence really shines a light upon its character or, rather, its impressive lack thereof. The Dublin Publopedia declares it “charmless”. DublinByPub affirms that it is “truly… a pub”. Even Google Maps can only bear to laud the – hardly trailblazing – “brick walls” and “wooden floors” that apparently define the place. Almost all reference this spot as a student haven too, leaving the savvy publican authors who wrote them somewhat dumbstruck. 

In spite of all this I can’t help but wonder:

Is Doyles any good…? 

Is this the place to be as a Trinity student…? 

Does anyone even care…? 

Let’s try to decode this enigma one step at a time.

Its location is key to its relevance among students. Doyles is one of the ‘bordering’ pubs around Trinity, alongside the likes of Kennedys, Lincolns Inn and Moss Lane. And yes, a totally inoffensive hypothesis would chalk up Doyles’ popularity to a matter of sheer convenience. But this Occam’s razor of an explanation just won’t do: I mean, WHO is going for a pint in the more campus-proximate Moss Lane, over the “charmless” pub where you will inevitably bump into someone you know? There must be more to the relationship between Trinity and Doyles than a simple matter of geography.

The pub has always had an intertwined history with Trinity College, cheekily wearing this title on its sleeve throughout the decades; before it was Doyles, the premises was the ‘College Inn’. Later in the 70s this was changed to the ‘Oscar Wilde’. This vaguely flirtatious yet explicit relationship through words of affirmations is no longer the case with the name we all know and love of ‘Doyles’, named after the current owner. To say Doyles is a ‘student bar’ though, would be sorely misguided. Where are the cheap drinks, the student deals, the youthful touches? It’s more of a traditional public house that caters to all. 

So let’s look at the more glaringly obvious question, Is Doyles actually… *shivers* good? Well, it’s complicated. The interior is hardly inspiring, evoking the colours of eternal autumn and the mid-70s. Think pale tawny walls, dark wood panelling, warm amber lighting. The especially trashed college student has been known to attempt to eat the deceptively gingerbread house looking interior in deranged Hansel-and-Gretel fashion. Yet, for many, this aesthetic is snug and welcoming, especially comforting during the winter. The circular bar downstairs prevents the typical rectangular squash of most bars and clubs. €6.40 for Guinness is daylight (or rather nighttime) robbery, but all too common a price in Dublin’s city centre. The bartenders are good craic if you treat them right. No comment on the bouncers…  

The function of Doyles is where the mystery begins to unravel, as its three floors allow it to operate as some sort of insane Schrodinger’s pub. The upstairs transforms into a quasi-nightclub past 11 o’clock. A sizable quarter of the room is partitioned for dancing and drinking, the house DJ plays a solid mix of pop anthems and nothing else. The rest of the room still retains the chairs and tables allowing for a very unique and ‘Doylesian’ experience of sitting down and hashing out polite chats in between splits of drunken ferocity on the dance floor. 

The Ruby Sessions in the basement also attract a considerable Tuesday night crowd, and have been going strong since 1999. This weekly live music event showcasing local and international talent has also featured some outrageously famous names over the years, such as Hozier, Ed Sheeran, and Paulo Nutini. The fact that the same pub runs these polar opposite events is beyond wild. Both cater shockingly well to the different spectrums of a low-energy vs high-energy night out. 

Carrying on from this is the low stakes and daily variety that Doyles also offers. From night to night, the upstairs can resemble an immovable human sea or a ghost town. Birthday parties, a Trinity course night out or society events will generally render the upstairs dense with students. The opposite is true if there’s little to nothing organised. Many nights fail to pick up any steam at all, as a steady flow of people arrive, take one look at the gloomy and deserted venue, and hastily flee the building without a second thought (“Chaplains…?”). Doyles always seems worth a try at least for this reason – the anticipation of “is it any good?” – and who can resist taking that wry peak upstairs as you move from one location to the next?

So, what is Doyles? Well, it’s the perfect place when you don’t have a plan, when there’s no stable mood or group consensus. It’s the compromise between those who want to travel and those who don’t, between those who want to go to The George and those who just want to go home, between the sleep-deprived Ents organiser and committee members that REALLY want some karaoke. At its core: it’s good enough, it does the job and, ever so rarely, you’ll have an amazing time. As long as Doyles still fills the gap that it does, I think its status as a Trinity hotspot is here to stay.