The Irish theme pub has been one of the most successful marketing phenomena of the past decade. Brash, noisy and ostentatious, it began its ascendancy in Britain around 1994 – the year in which Jack Charlton’s Irish football team qualified for the World Cup, an event that engendered a great deal of enthusiasm (and drinking) in Britain. More crucially, it was the year of the first Provisional IRA ceasefire. Not only was Ireland now peaceful, but the Irish were seen as life- affirming, fun-loving folk whose lifestyle, as depicted in such stage and small-screen successes as Riverdance, Father Ted and Ballykissangel, we wished to imitate.
The Irish theme pub was not to everybody’s taste. The manner in which British breweries such as Allied Domecq, Scottish & Newcastle and Bass mass- manufactured these pubs – in the guise of Scruffy Murphy’s, Finnegan’s Wake and O’Neill’s respectively – distressed real ale enthusiasts who were fearful of the erosion of the genuine local boozer. And for cultural purists, the outright distortion of the real thing grated heavily. The pubs with their accordians, road signs to Galway and whiskey mirrors – all mass-produced in a factory in Atlanta, Georgia – were not, they moaned, like real Irish bars, but were kitsch, commodified representations.
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