TLRH | The History of the Irish Pub

Friday, 12 March 2021, 1 – 2pm With many Irish people mourning the
closure of their local pub, we celebrate St. Patrick’s Day by
asking what place the Irish pub holds in our history and culture.
How did people use pubs in the past, and what was the popular
attitude towards them? Famous the world over, is the Irish pub
indeed an imagined space embedded in the concept of “Irish
hospitality”? In this panel discussion chaired by Dr Ciaran
O’Neill, Deputy Director of the Trinity Long Room Hub, speakers
will look at Irish pubs through the ages and the perception of
public houses a century ago; the place of the pub in the history of
folk music and revolution; what the pub means in Irish theatre, and
what it tells us about ‘Irishness’ and performance of culture.
Prior to the panel discussion, four musicians from the Traditional
Music Society of Trinity College Dublin (Claire Stafford, Sarah
McKenna, Simon O'Connor, and Oisín Cullen) will be playing live
music - make sure to tune in from 12:50 pm to catch some live
tunes! Speakers: Dr Ciarán Wallace The pub has never been just a
place where you bought alcohol. How did people use pubs in the
past? Who went to pubs, who didn't? What was the popular attitude
towards them? Ciarán will look at pubs in some cartoons published a
century ago to see what they can tell us. Trish Murphy, Director of
the College Health Service What is the personal impact of the pub
environment on people’s lives and communities? This talk will
examine the personal story of growing up in a pub in a small town
in the West of Ireland--both the good and the bad. The story will
also highlight the skills that were developed from pub culture, and
how this speaker used these when working in detention centres,
prisons, and travelling alone in far flung places. Jack Sheehan If
the pub is to Irish folk music what the coffee house is to American
folk music, what does that say about Ireland? From the White Horse
Inn of Greenwich Village, where musicians mixed with politicians,
writers and radicals, to the Bogside Inn of Derry, where music
accompanied planning for revolution, how can we describe the
musical culture of the Irish pub?, Jack Sheehan’s talk will be
emotional rather than intellectual, a slightly shaggy wander in and
out of various times, places and of course, pubs. Moonyoung Hong
What are the links between two performative spaces – theatre and
the pub – and their significance in Irish history and culture? The
talk will examine the political, literary and cultural implications
of J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World (1907), Sean
O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars (1926) – both of which caused
riots at the Abbey Theatre – as well as the works of other
contemporary Irish playwrights who use the pub as their plays’
setting, to interrogate the (problematic) ideas of “Irishness” and
“platiality” (Chaudhuri, 1997). Learn more at:
https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/