Welcome to the second in a rare series where I try to document all the pubs somewhere in a single day. Having done (or failed to do, looking at it another way) Dungloe a few weeks ago when storms affected my weekend; this time I drove up rather than face Dublin Airport's security queues. And while driving and pub bagging are incompatible, I was able to park up and do this the next day - and drive home two days later!
Arranmore currently has six licenced premises. I have now drunk in all of them, but I can't document all in this post.
The first problematic premises is LEP015 Killeens Hotel - up for sale for some years, it is not currently trading. I last drank here in ~2016. If anyone wants to run a 24 bed hotel, please study the sale (or rent, as I now notice) documents.
The second problematic premises is LEP431 Smugglers Nite Club. I also last drank here in ~2016, and would have gone back - except it rarely opens before midnight. There is a conventional bar (the Seaview Bar) attached to the club, but it has not opened regularly for decades (as far as I'm aware, but I have been in it); and I wasn't up for turning an afternoons drinking in to an exceptionally late night.
This leaves me with four operating premises. When I was a kid, there was a seventh pub - Pallys - but it closed for good in 2002. There was another pub in the 60s/70s - Proctors - in the "factory" - a Gaeltarra Eireann facility in a former dance hall which still exists now as the community centre, sans licence.
[not sure] Neilys
My local up here. My Grandads local til he stopped being able to go to the pub (in ~2005). In the middle of the island, there was an adjoining shop here until Summer 2021 and this was where my interactions with it as a kid were. Neilys now manages to succesfully ride the line between being a locals pub most of the year, and the coolest place on the island when there's lots of tourists and holiday home owners in during the summer - cocktails, craft beer and a pizza van in summer give way to pints and football on Sky in the winter. I started and ended the days trip here - being closest to my house and on the way to and from anywhere else.
Neilys appears on the licence registers as LEO002 - an off-licence code, and recorded as a spirits off licence; and I've never seen its pub licence recorded, but a pub it absolutely is so this is likely a Revenue issue - some Dublin pubs have been unlisted for years. Neilys is the most modern looking and feeling of any of the pubs and worth the walk in to the middle of the island.
1009262 Phil Bans
The only pub I hadn't yet drunk in, despite often being in it as a kid - and always using its shop. Right on the beach near the ferry, I suspect that Phils gets the bulk of the lazier tourists, and is a decent pub despite never having fallen to my drinking patterns before. A larger front room is somewhat divided off from a back room that often matches the surface of the sun in air temperature - due to a turf fire - which has waves almost lapping against its windows at spring tides. Phil Bans shop fed my Irn Bru and McDaids Banana consumption as a child - I only took to Football Special as a teenager.
For whatever historical reason, like Neilys the shop has its own spirits only off-licence with the fantastic licence number of LEO001 - Letterkenny court area, off-licence, licence number one
LEP014 The Glen Hotel
Paging Francis Brennan.... After nearly a century operating as a hotel, there is a need for significant investment in facilities and services here. Unbeatable beer garden when the weather suits, though.
LEP013 Earlys Pier Bar
The place that gave Daniel O'Donnell his start, and the only pub that consistently has food available all year (as of the time of posting this). We got a decent dinner here; and left just as a huge hen night arrived for theirs - thankfully. Jerry Early is very active in promoting the island for tourism; and supporting the remaining commercial fishermen, so this is the pub that most media people end up going to. With a small front bar and a large performance space out back, this pub is least like the others - which are all really single room affairs, albeit maybe big rooms (Neilys) or with a divider nearly splitting them (Phil Bans). Earlys has been modernised significantly in recent years, albeit not the level of Neilys
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