Friday 21 September 2018

N0249 Mullingar House

"A Joycean Pub". A phrase that frequently dooms a pub to being a tourist trap, or causes mass confusion when demolition of a not even contemporaneous version of it begins - the 1930s Ormond Hotel building being the example here.The Mullingar House is a Joycean Pub, or at least the outside walls of it are; and quite an important one at that, being the principal location in Finnegans Wake.

Rebuilt heavily in the 2000s after semi-dereliction, there is little here from the era of the book and only a plaque and the name of the upstairs restaurant exist as signs of that past.

A fairly normal suburban pub these days, I didn't get a particularly good feeling from the atmosphere and hence didn't stay for much longer than my pint. Others have enjoyed it however, at least the Joycean blogger who wrote this post explaining the background to how the pub became critical to the book.

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