I am so very often inundated with videos on my telephone of the worst men you will ever meet in your life attempting to rate, berate and indicate as of late their favourite boozers either in Dublin’s proverbial gullet, or in some other made-up part of the world such as a far-off city I’m told is called London.

Between Eton boys “Scoring Schooners” and Meath men moaning on about “Shtick” and “Dome”, the prospect for the future of travel blogging is looking GRIM. I myself am under the belief that these individuals should have to complete a mandatory vetting process to find out whether their mates actually like them or not before being granted a camera and tripod to make such dribbling nonsense as a “Pint Review” video.

My disdain for such content aside, the recent rise in pub culture has led to heavy ended commercialisation of what should be communal third spaces. The relegation of the pub to a ‘Top Ten List’, the over emphasis on stout quality, the fetishisation of “Authentic” Irish pubs and their gentrification as a result, reviewing culture, content overproduction and general twattery around Guinness is a poisonous stain on tradition, history and community.

My musings, many of which are booze related, have landed me a reading or two of a George Orwell piece written in the mid forties amidst London’s bombings and bludgeonings at the hands of the Axis Powers. The Moon Under Water is Orwell’s lego brick instructions for the perfect pub, Tir na nOl if you would.

The polemic laid out around ten solid sentiments the man would wish to see in an ideal pub. Open fires that could ignite the ‘modern miseries’ of Victorian woodwork and the ‘solid comfortable ugliness of the nineteenth century’ made the aesthetics out to be much less important than pseudo-pint-punters would have you believe.I immediately think of The Palace or McDaids and its bestial sanctum filled with pretentious posers trying to be the next Behan, Mehan or Flann.

Fret not friends, for there’s food to be had. Sandwiches and biscuits is more my jive than any twenty five euro roast dinner. I’ve been eating miserably for years and it makes me quite happy. If my wild-western cowboy demeanour wasn’t obvious from my appearance, this is where me and Orwell really gel. Dart boards relegated to the public bar, draught stout and caraway seeds, sausage sambos and mussels. Orwell is incidentally the first writer to speak truth to power when it comes to bars selling pickles, and for once, I really feel spoken for. Best pub grub in Dub? Probably the WowBurger in Mary’s. 

Mr. Animal Farm drones on for another few lines about small aesthetic subsidiaries, that when it comes down to it, do not affect the pub experience whatsoever only in so much as for a content farming hooligan would use it to rate the ‘ambiance’ category one to five on his TikTok page. For Orwell, he would prefer his draught stout in a ‘strawberry pink china mug’ : through extensive research I’ve declared this to be one of the greatest writers of the 20th century ‘taking the utter piss’ . 

What is really at the centre of The Moon Under Water is community. Bar maids with dyed hair calling you ‘dear’ and who know the regulars, not drunkards or blow-in content consumers, all by name. Sprawling expansive gardens where the children can play and a woman can enjoy a glass of cider in the summer with the rest of the family. No radio or piano can quell the chatter because it doesn’t exist, nor does Martin Tyler yelling on the TV to appease the one guy in the corner who “wants to hear the commentary” over a Hull City match. Bars are for talking to people and don’t get it twisted.

A note on children in bars. It is exclusionary (with the notion of a nuclear family) to bar children from the pub during the day time as it upholds a long tradition of therefore excluding women, the common primary caregiver, a seat at the high stool. Pubs are for drinking, not for getting drunk, and anybody who’s been tossed down the stairs in Whelan’s by security before will tell you that. So I would say up until seven or eight pm, pubs can and should be a safe environment for all members of the family.

Family is crucial to Orwell here when we’re talking about community. It builds a tighter sense of familiarity as people know each other in their area – through school, sport, carpooling, religious gatherings as well as extended family,  so cousins, aunts,uncles etc. Maybe I’m being a bit of a sap as I come from the countrysidebut the sentiment still stands in cities.

Orwell postulates that when you ask someone why they like a pub they would ‘put the beer first’ but nay the thing that appeals most to Orwell ‘is what people call its “atmosphere”. This is to say, what I’ve been talking about so far,

I know for a fact you do not care about stout quality as much as you think you do. You want the perfect pint of Guinness? Go stand outside in the middle of December when it is three degrees or colder, get a pint from an outside bar and stand there drinking it while your toes go numb. Guinness will maintain its taste, texture, shtick and dome perfectly at those conditions and the climate will ensure it doesn’t go warm or flat. But the experience ? A bit cold I’d say. 

The average punter is not and should not be choosing their communal meeting grounds based off a scored average of some dope who has only been to the pub once. I sound like a bitter publican but I’m really just a cynical-masochist with a laptop.

Dublin strives so often to commercialise and categorize pubs in a way that we can consume their experience more palatably and quickly. This is largely to do with a lack of tourist attractions. In reality it’s about lived experience, not going to a random pub for the experience,. ave a local you like and stick to it,  and you’ll learn to like it more.  Shoehorning is a risk that people take when they try to categorise pubs too quickly. People wanting the best “authentic Irish pub experience” likely belong in Temple Bar.

2100 bars have closed in the last 20 years in this country and it is largely to do with the abandonment of the ‘local’ while also simultaneously romanticising it. How does this work? Tom’s video on Grogans with its objectively excellent Guinness informs Larry, the viewer through a standardised rating system, that this is where he should drink. Larry lives in Harold’s Cross and thus does not go across the road to The Harold House anymore and instead flees to the inner city to sit outside on a lonely stool with hundreds of others who have done the same. Instead of engaging in his local community and drinking where his neighbours and colleagues drink, people who work in the local shop , local schools and so on,, Larry now only drinks in Grogans and the surrounding pubs get run-off business when there’s no seats left. I’m generalising but you get the gist.

Community breaks down as a result of this process that deems other pubs more valuable than others, and this can very much be seen in the continuous interviews which cite bars like Grave Diggers (a great pub by the way)as the number one bar in the city. Please stop commodifying bars. What’s the best pub in Dublin? Probably the first one you can find that you and all your friends can sit down  and have a chat in. 

Does The Moon Under Water exist in Dublin ? No -never did, never will, that is if you’re looking at it from the perspective of the ten qualities needed for a good boozer/ TikTok rating systems. Does it exist in Orwell’s vision that human interaction is the only determining factor of paradise? Of course it does, just go across the road.