The Final Quarter: The Road Ahead

I'm sort-of three quarters of the way through this entire project now. If you calculate it in raw numbers, a little short; if you calculate it in terms of what's open, a little beyond. I'll give those figures now:

As of the time of writing this, I've visited 743 of the premises on the February 2024 Revenue licence release (plus one that I'm sure is coming soon but still isn't listed; and about 30 places no longer registered).

There are 1005 premises in-scope on that register. 35 of them are either not trading, or trading in a manner which makes it improbable to tick off - they're an off-licence, or a hotel that does not serve non-guests despite having a full pub licence. One place left to visit has two licences, a pub and a theatre, on the same premises - there are a small few others that have this that I have visited already.

This leaves ~220 premises left to tick off; and pickings are starting to get quite thin - and this could lead to a slow down on here within a few months. 

In that ~220, we have:

* 33 theatres, galleries/event spaces, cinemas and racecourses that require ticketed entry

* 16 places that are definitely restaurants and will require booking, eating (and paying for) dinner

* 13 hotels that are unlikely to allow walk-in drinkers

* 6 golf course clubhouses, which may be difficult or impossible to drink in without a member

* 3 strip clubs, which I have no reason to go to and don't even understand *how* you go to them

This leaves ~150 "normal pubs" (which includes a sizeable number of hotel bars and places more like restaurants that are willing to serve drinkers)

With the exception of a few relatively easy to do clusters - Finglas village is one I've just never got around to and may do very soon - and the towns of Rush and Balbriggan which have a reasonable amount each; this leaves me with scattered single premises that cannot be ticked off quickly.

A recent, yet to be written up, trip taking about as long as I'd normally ever devote to a Winter days ticking - and which I had a driver for - got four premises done; and I expect this is going to be the norm going forward.

I've got another driver-assisted trip planned which will kill off much of the rest of the car-only ones and longer evenings coming may make some weekend or half-day schleps a bit more palatable. 

So my attempt at having a post every two days, which frequently falls apart, is definitely going to have to slow down to maybe every three from now on. Unless there's a sudden pub opening boom, which is unlikely to happen with current licencing laws - and I will probably cut off the list anyway at the date the proposed new ones come in, if they ever do.