The Local: Experiencing Irish Culture and Community at a Local Pub

By: Patrick McCusker

October 12, 2012

I gave myself a lot of flak for deciding to study abroad in Dublin when it came time for me to make my decision last fall. While it certainly made the most sense for me given what I wanted to experience and when exactly I’d be able to leave during the calendar year (the Irish academic calendar matches up extremely well with ours), I didn’t feel like I was stretching myself enough culturally. The spoken language is English, it is part of Western Europe, and there are enough Irish immigrants to the United States that the cultures have experienced a mutual sharing for decades now.

When I arrived in Dublin in early September, I did in fact find this to be the case. There were struggles in adjusting to life in a new country with few familiar people and different items in the supermarket. But there was no real culture shock that I’ve learned about from friends in other countries. How then, could I find the unique experience I had sought out when I applied to leave Georgetown for a semester?

I started out by doing what any inquisitive, eager young college student in my situation would do. I went to the nearby pub with a few other students from Georgetown. Pubs in Ireland are of a different breed than our bars back home, or for that matter even our Irish pubs back home. They only started serving food of any kind in the 1960s and 1970s, and the fare today is still pretty sparse. You don’t go for dinner and a few drinks, but rather to socialize and gather as a community.

I’m not speaking of the type of tourist bar that would normally attract the American college student. I’m talking about “the local,” a term used affectionately by Irish people the whole country over to refer to the neighborhood establishment that serves as a sort of unofficial town hall to the towns and cities that have sprung up across the Emerald Isle. Whether you’re in Dublin or a small town like Glendalough or Clarinbridge, the local often functions as the center of community.

When we stepped into O’Donoghue’s Pub on Baggot Street, we found a crowd of mostly older men and women who were sitting around enjoying each other’s company, welcoming all newcomers. It was much easier to strike up a conversation, even across generational gaps, than with strangers back in the United States. Then there was the music, the highlight of it all. Ireland is blessed with a rich folk history, dating back centuries and carefully documented and preserved through the government founded Irish Folklore Commission of the 1930s that still maintains its collection today. The music is in many ways the heart of this comprehensive tradition.

Not only would a few prepared musicians come to the front and play their songs while everyone gathered around, but the songs would be instantly known by everyone in the pub, taught to them by their parents and grandparents and cherished together over a lifetime. Anyone is invited to come up and try their hand at the guitar or the tin whistle or the hand drum, and even we tourists can get a sense of the tightly knit community embodied by these songs. These aren’t songs that a young Irish adult would listen to on his or her iPod, don’t get me wrong. But he or she would know these songs. Like the jazz standards any musician worth his salt would know if he wanted to play a Harlem club, these ballads and anthems and jigs, when experienced with one’s neighbors at the local in that uniquely communal atmosphere, have a way of illuminating true identity and a sort of unofficial citizenship.

Ireland and the United States share so much in our customs and practices, yet this tiny rock is home to only about 6.1 million (including the 1.75 million or so in Northern Ireland). With such a small nation, keeping a centuries old culture alive and thriving is no easy task. Today, the pubs and the songs of those pubs and the people who sing those songs serve that purpose. Ireland is alive and well, and I’m glad I’ve been able to find a little piece of it.

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