My family did not fall into the pub business. We built it, generation by generation, the way other families build law firms or farms.
It started in County Clare in the west of Ireland, where my grandfather ran a grocery store in a small market town. Next door sat a centuries-old stone building — originally a grain mill, dating to 1865. He converted it into the first secondary school in the region. After that, my uncle and my dad took the same walls, the same high ceilings, and transformed them one more time — into the family tavern, one of the most important music venues Ireland ever produced.
Everyone who was anyone in traditional Irish music played that stage. The Chieftains. The Wolfe Tones. Christy Moore, who later wrote that it was “the best gig in the country” and that the lock-ins were “legendary.” The Furey Brothers played their very first gig there together as a band. Brendan Grace performed on that stage as a teenager. Clannad (the family band from which Enya went solo). Eamon De Valera, future President of Ireland, once gave his first speech to the people of East Clare from the bedroom window of the family home.
After my father helped my uncle with the family tavern he went in a different direction. He bought one of the oldest pubs in Ireland — a medieval stone building dating to 1324, once home to Dame Alice de Kyteler, the first person in Ireland formally accused of witchcraft. There is something darkly appropriate about my family running a pub built by a woman tried for sorcery. What is a well-run bar, after all, if not a kind of spell — an engineered environment designed to make people feel things they would not feel otherwise, want things they did not know they wanted, and stay considerably longer than they planned?
I was too young to see the inside of those clubs. But summers meant County Clare, my grandfather’s place, the family tavern. My cousins and I had the run of the bar during the dead hours before opening — the barrels, the taps, the bottles lined up along the back wall like soldiers. We were nine, ten years old, mixing together whatever we could reach. We called our creation the Creamy Lather — a concoction of Harp, Guinness, and grenadine, named for the interesting head it produced. We thought we were mixologists. We were children teaching ourselves to drink in a room built by adults who should have known better. Nobody stopped us. It was not malice. It was the culture. Drink was the water we swam in, and we did not know you could drown in water.
That’s where it began.