Chances are that if you celebrated St. Patrick’s Day this year, there was an appropriate destination not far from your home, no matter where you live.
Ever wondered why you can find an Irish pub almost anywhere in the world?
From Corona del Mar to Calcutta, Marin County to Mongolia, those cozy, familiar havens have established themselves in almost every community where tipplers like to hoist a pint. Dark wood paneling, Guinness on tap, lilting fiddle music in the background, a framed picture of James Joyce next to the Jameson and Bushmills behind the bar – the look and feel of Irish pubs are as familiar and venerable as the inside of a Catholic church, no matter where you find them.
The reasons behind the Irish bar’s ubiquitous presence are a fascinating combination of 19th-century immigration patterns and 21st-century marketing.
Before the middle of the 1800s, the Irish immigrant community in the U.S. was rather small (about 10 percent of the nation’s 17 million people in 1840) and mostly Protestant, so they blended well with the established population. But then the Emerald Isle was beset by troubling times, culminating with the Great Famine, which began in 1845 and lasted for seven years. America’s Irish population doubled between 1840 and 1860; from 1840-50, the Irish accounted for almost half the immigrants entering the U.S.
Almost all the newly arrived Irish were Catholic, and 90 percent of them settled in urban neighborhoods. In the late 19th century, three-fourths of America’s Irish expatriate population lived in large cities in Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Ohio.
Like most immigrants who came with little or nothing, the Irish struggled, and they were shut out of many retail businesses. Saloon-keeping, though, was considered a road to the middle class for the Irish, since it was considered a disreputable pursuit for a respectable member of the merchant class, yet the profit margins were high. Ambitious Irishmen flocked to the profession.
Worcester, Mass., is typical of the trend. In 1880, two-thirds of the applicants for liquor permits were Irish, though less than one-third of the town’s population was from Eire.
In 1899, respected statistician John Koren studied U.S. crime figures and concluded that Irish pubs were hotbeds of trouble, even though Irish immigrants of the time were no more crime-prone than Americans as a whole. The hurtful stereotype lingered for years. It probably didn’t help that Irish saloons, with some exceptions, catered to a less well-heeled customer than German beer gardens, which were also popular at the time. In New York’s Five Points, an infamous Irish slum, there were 169 saloons for a population of 24,000 in 1860, but only one bathtub for every 1,321 families. Pubs were a cheap panacea for the huddled masses.
Gradually, the Irish pub lost its unsavory reputation, though typically it’s still thought of as a working-class watering hole.
Aiming for authenticity
Those modest origins make the developments of the past three decades amusingly ironic: the Irish pub has been discovered and promoted by Big Business.
Guinness, Ireland’s best-known brewer, is owned by Diageo, one of the giants of the alcoholic beverage universe. It is partnering with the Irish Pub Co., a Dublin group formed in 1990 whose purpose is “to provide the best Irish pub concepts throughout the world.”
The Irish Pub Co. provides all the basics anyone would need to re-create a wee bit of Ireland wherever they please: interior finishes, furniture, lighting, bric-a-brac, even sports memorabilia and musical instruments. It claims that no two pubs it designs are the same.
Ironically, the company website stresses “authenticity” as one of its goals. It encourages bar owners to employ Irish immigrants if it can find them.
More than 2,000 Irish pubs opened in Europe between 1992 and 1999 as a result of the partnership between Diageo and the Irish Pub Co. The concept has since spread to more than 50 countries worldwide.
Six main pub styles are offered (and you thought there was only one kind of Irish bar): “Gastro,” “Victorian,” “Brewery,” “Country,” “Shop” and “Celtic.”
Dublin architect Mel McNally, founder of the Irish Pub Co., emphasizes that Irish pubs are popular with tourists, locals and Emerald Isle expats.
“People engage with the sense of community, friendship and conviviality they find in an authentic Irish pub. (And they’re an) important connection from Ireland and its people to the rest of the world,” McNally said in an interview with Men’s Journal. “For the diaspora, the Irish pubs are gathering venues which allow them to feel home. It’s an important portal to Ireland.”
Orange County is home to a wealth of Irish (and pseudo-Irish) pubs. So there are plenty of places to soak up the spirit of St. Patrick’s Day.
Contact the writer: phodgins@ocregister.com
