S0962 Hartleys

There's been a series of "lasts" as I come towards the end of the list - last pub or hotel in this chain or that mostly. This instead is the last of a type - this bar operates under a Railway Refreshment Rooms licence.

In theory, these are only meant to serve customers with tickets for a 10 mile distance; but this is effectively neither checked nor enforced; and anyway - any Leap card can become a ticket for this when tagged on (However, when Good Friday drinking was restricted, any Railway Refreshment Rooms that were actually open did check for tickets)

This was, I believe, the final 'refreshment room' actually operated by Irish Rail, under their Network Catering division as Brasserie na Mara; but when Irish Rail ceased doing it's own catering, the restaurant closed with it. 

Hartleys opened here in ~2008 and has traded since, with drinkers accommodated on a terrace and diners inside in the Victorian railway dining room. The drinks are exceptionally expensive, even for Dun Laoghaire; but there is often live music and the terrace is an interesting place to sit and view the harbour, so there may still be a reason to go here for some.

S3046 The Swallows

While I still had my driver, I decided to get a pub that would require multiple bus-changes to get to knocked off the list.

The Swallows must be the newest (and second-last, I believe) 'grocery pub' in Dublin; but like the other - the White House in Baldoyle - the shop is separate from the pub; in this case sharing only the front door and much of the signage.

The pub is of the big single room / open plan layout common of 90s suburban pubs, although it looks to me like the floor area can be halved with a moving wall, presumably to make it more manageable when quiet.

S4405 The Address Citywest

A week or so before this visit, I had stayed in the Sligo sister hotel of this, also called The Address - and had snarked at the bar/restaurant being called North, as I wouldn't consider Sligo to be particularly Northern.

On arriving here I found that the bar is again called North. They're all called North in this chain, which is from Donegal and has what I'd consider a legitimate claim to the term. All's good.

The hotel here is an old country house with an added bedroom wing; with the bar and restaurant in what I assume are some genuine outbuildings. There's a more restaurant-y bit, but you can drink there; and what seemed to be a bar or function room section that was quite loud. The outdoor area is very nice in the right weather, even if the plastic sheep are a bit of an odd choice...

There is a bit of housing being developed nearby here, so this is likely to be their local, as such; considering none were ever developed in the bulk of Citywest and both S3757 Browns Barn and the pub in Fortunestown has closed.

S1661 Green Isle Hotel

I'd been to this hotel a few times before, using the conferencing facilities - most notably, many years ago, an all-hands meeting in work telling us that a certain % were being laid off because the CEO needed a new 911 "times were tough"; but I'd never drunk here prior to this visit. 

The bar of the Green Isle is large, and was busy and even slightly raucous when we visited - this certainly stands in for the lack of any pub in this bit of Clondalkin. 

The hotel itself seems to be extremely popular with trades/builders from down the country using it as their Dublin base - there are even signs asking you to clean your boots when coming in from the carpark (incidentally, one of the worst designed / tightest carparks I've ever been in); so I suspect the bar is also busy with that custom on weekday/Sunday evenings.

It is still, however, clearly a hotel bar without much attempt to make it feel more like a pub - for instance, it is accessed behind reception.

Revenue register update, June 2025

Nothing of note this month, not even in nerdy details.

S3226 Maldron Hotel Newlands Cross

Dalata hotels don't really seem to look at their bars as major profit centres, with them often being very constrained or even closed; so I was vaguely expecting another bottle of Heineken in a lobby like my most recent Dalata visit.

But no, there is actually a fairly big bar here, open to the public up until the mid evening. It isn't particularly interesting, but there isn't another pub in this end of Clondalkin - well, not until the next hotel - so it may be useful for weekends.

S4515 Louis Fitzgerald Hotel

There are seven hotels along the Naas Road in Dublin, starting from the Red Cow and working outwards.

The first two (the Red Cow and the Ibis) and the seventh (City West) are currently not open to the public, and the Ibis only had a residents bar licence anyway; but the other four are fully trading; and despite having been at events in some of them, I'd never drunk in any of them.

So, with the help of a driver, I got all four done in fairly rapid succession.

First up is the Louis Fitzgerald, a very rare case of a hotel named after a living owner - excluding family surnames on some hotels that is. Built beside his longer standing Joel's restaurant, there is a further restaurant in the lobby here; but there is also a normal bar.

Louis has an admitted reputation as hoarder/collector, and it seems the hotel he's named after himself gets the best goodies - his GB£80,000 1904 Wolseley 6hp

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This is the last Fitzgerald Group premises for me, for now - Louis is likely to add some more.

1016097 Mackenzies

This is the last of the "random womans name" Paddy McKillen Jr restaurants for me to tick, and it's just as generic as them all. Except here, you really do need to eat - there isn't an option for a bar booking; and indeed you do need to book because walk-ins were not being taken on the night I was here.

I seriously doubt I'll be back.

S0257 Buglers Ballyboden House

I'm not sure there's a current pub name I have to try so hard not to misspell - the Colosseum in Walkinstown no longer holding that name, thankfully. "Bulgers" seems to scan better, despite Bugler being a semi common surname, and a type of musician at that. I may just be remembering a horrific incident that was heavily reported when I was a kid, though.

There's more than a few newspaper archive references to "Bulgers" as well, covering both the pre- and post-spellcheck eras of newspaper editing (the pub has been Buglers since 1954) so at least it's not only me.

Another packed pub - three in a row, albeit they aren't all that far apart - I ended up in a corner of the bar rather than in the fairly recently renovated lounge, or the covered outdoor area so new you can see the demolition of the old one on Streetview.

1010020 Eden House

Approaching this pub from the road feels a bit weird - as the pub doesn't address the main road at all. 

When you do get in to it, via the start of a housing estate, it becomes clear that the pub is in a very old building - a Georgian manor house called, appropriately, Eden House.

Eden House - the manor, that is - was redeveloped in the mid 1990s in to the pub we now have; with a small retail/office development and a housing estate built on the lands.

The pub itself has a variety of Georgian or Victorian features left inside, and has quite an unusual layout due to the room layout of the house itself. It was also absolutely and utterly rammed when I visited, so I ended up outside rather than continuing to wander around inside. This may be worth a revisit when quiet; but the reason it has ended up so late in my ticks is that it isn't quite the easiest place to get to!

S1328 Ballinteer House

Another single storey, shopping centre carpark pub but with rather less of the semi-architectural interest of the Coach House - this is a bit of a box.

And a very busy box it was too; with not a lot of free tables and a huge amount of food being served at the time of my visit. Surprisingly, there was a single Irish independent tap on offer - Trouble Ambush - which is what I enjoyed at the only free table I could find.

The pub apparently features a six-table snooker hall - with snooker tables very rare in pubs to begin with, and even more than one cue sports table of any description being rarer this is not something you're going to find often.

S0251 Sandyford House

Sandyford, the business park area, has lots of buses; and is walkable from the Luas. It has two not-really pubs and once had a hotel.

Sandyford, the village it's named after, has one irregular bus and eluded me for quite a while - it took close to three hours to get here due to poor meshing of public transport timings; and a lengthy amount of time to get to the next pub afterwards; but I made it.

The Sandyford House claims to date to the 1690s and certainly bits of the pub are very old; but with the 16 years of Streetview passes showing three completely different paint jobs and multiple different approaches to outdoor seating, they certainly aren't unwilling to modify this place! The balcony seating, removed since the earliest passes, is an interesting loss.

I didn't venture any further than the front bar - named Boss Crokers, after the Irish-American politician and former namesake of a pub on the Quays, most recently N0185 Index. I got one of the window bays on my own, as the bar was not terribly busy when I attended. 

A longer visit than normal ensued here, due to the bus times; and I took a few photos of some of the historical paperwork on the walls... which I now can't find. I'm certainly not going on another five hour round-trip mission to re-take them!

S1177 Coach House

If I ever do get around to writing something on the morphology of Dublin pubs, the single storey, high roofed open-plan pub (often, but far from always, beside a shopping centre) will probably take the place of the "generic 80s suburban pub", even if some examples are not from the 80s. And they're a type of pub we're rapidly losing, as many of them succumb to the appeal of their car parks to apartment or supermarket developers.

And indeed, we may yet lose the Coach House - planning was granted in 2023 to demolish and replace with apartments and a "cafe/wine bar" a quarter of the size of the current pub. However, it is still trading currently.

A good example of that form of pub, and with a better range of drinks than many pubs in the city, I'd probably be fairly annoyed if I was local and this was proposed for demolition.

N0023 Admiral

This place currently trades as a restaurant and as such, you do need to eat to get served here. It has previously - while still Admiral - had external signage stating that it was a karaoke bar; but this seems to have been removed around the time the fake bow and prow of a ship were added to the outside walls!

A pan-Eastern-and-Central-European restaurant, this was frequently formerly described as a "Russian" restaurant; but the prominent Ukrainian flags flying from outside the premises should dissuade you from this.

The pub itself is under a multi-storey car park, the construction of which involved demolishing an older pub - The Peacock - further down Marlborough Street. The name, and I assume the licence - such a low serial number indicates a very old licence - moved up to the corner with Cathal Brugha Street after that. The Peacock was sold off in around 2002 after multiple legal issues including an attemp by Gardai to have its licence removed.

There were a few other brief incarnations after this, including an Eastern European bar "Baltika", but it opened as the marine-themed Admiral in the late 00s.

I'm barely a bar reviewer, so getting a food review from me isn't happening - but I was happy enough with the schnitzel I got. Beer choices on draught are more than you'd expect in most restaurants, but do primarily consist of the national draught lager/pilsners of the countries that the restaurant serves the food of.

DG0489 The Bus Bar

Another of my "opened too late in the evening" Skerries misses from my 2021 visit; the Bus Bar burnt down in late 2023. Unlike the slow progress of reopening we see with some other pub fires of the past few years; work started very rapidly here and the pub reopened within ~13 months.

Since the pandemic, a portion of the front of the pub has been taken up by a coffee shop; and this is retained in the rebuilt pub. This leaves a small bar to the front, but with a large lounge to the rear.

Said front bar is quite nice, a one-manner in layout that could convince you that you are in a tiny pub somewhere rather than an element of a bigger setup.

The pubs name intrigues me; but I presume is easily explained by the bus stop for various services from Dublin (and to Balbriggan and rarely Dundalk) being pretty much right outside the door. It has been called that name since opening in the early 1930s.

DG0495 Nealons

I missed this on my previous trip out to Skerries as it opens quite late on weekdays - as then did half the pubs in the town - and I could only really get one of the early evening openers done before going for my train.

The front of the pub looks like something you'd see in a tiny village, not a large enough suburb / seaside resort. The inside extends well beyond the area that the shopfront would suggest, with a rabbit warren of small areas to the front, where you should be able to find somewhere to wedge yourself in, even when busy. It all opens out a bit at the back with a smoking area and big screens. 

I still haven't been to all of the remaining pubs in Skerries - the town still has a sizeable number despite a significant decline in recent years - and while DG0492 The Gladstone Inn is definitely a more traditional pub; Nealons brings in a bit of modernity in a completely inoffensive way.

DG0480 Dempseys

A pub reopening should always be a good occasion, but finding out that one is about to reopen just as you're ticking off all the pubs near it can be a tad annoying. And so it was when I visited Balbriggan in early 2024 and found Dempseys approaching the end of its refurb. 

Formerly The Millrace, one of those pubs where the sales ads online linger for years after being sold; and indeed it lingered for years closed too - the last social media activity for the pub was in 2015 but it may have survived til the pandemic.

The refurb was extensive and the fairly dated interior you can (currently, anyway) see in the linked sales ad is gone; replaced with the faux-old type that has returned to fashion in recent years and should hopefully age well. Despite trying to look old, it's definitely the most modern pub in Balbriggan as it stands.

On opening, a relatively strict dress code was posted, with one entry - "no coats" - raising a lot of eyebrows in a country with a climate that often requires them. This, I suspect, was there to ensure that anyone wanting to flaunt a jacket from specific brands that have acquired a particular reputation wouldn't bother coming in.

That said, I wasn't barred from entering with mine on, despite it being from one of the brands sort of on the edges of that - but it wasn't black or grey so that might have been enough!

N2723 The Hamlet

This pub is a rare enough beast in Dublin - it is a new build, ground floor pub in an apartment block that actually seems to be doing pretty well. 

Lots of apartment and/or retail developments in the 00s included a proposed pub, and often they never opened or have struggled significantly to take off. The closest one to me, just a bit outside of Dublin admittedly, eventually opened as a restaurant about ten years after construction; not holding a pub licence at all. It is possible that being the only pub outside of the town centre in Balbriggan may have helped, as some equivalents are near existing pubs; but there are still a litany of failures elsewhere.

The exterior is rather bland, being that mid 00s retail design of yellow brick and large aluminium windows; but the pub inside is fairly nice and well staffed, with my pint being dropped over after it had settled. 

Revisited pubs, May 2025

May's revisits have a few 'new' entries, as in not the ones you see every month; but the old classics turn up regardless. Also, as I now have so few city centre places to visit anew, I end up in places I've been before more and more often.

S0083 Beer Temple - pint before dinner time
S0106 The Porterhouse - dinner time. Not sure why I didn't just have a burger in the Beer Temple, but that isn't important
N0097 Underdog - regular visit
S0172 The Waterloo - hiding in a snug wasting time before a work event nearby
S0027 The Lombard - bus was so delayed due to roadworks after said work event that I had 65 minutes wait for a train from Pearse
S0077 Nearys - regular meeting location
S0088 Foggy Dew - burning up time before a bus, and seeing some tourists making a scene of themselves
1000393 Gilbert & Wright - going in to the Wright Group Time Machine, as the pub I was trying to tick off was completely full
N0006 Brew Dock - dinner again
S0026 Lincolns Inn - waiting for a dinner appointment nearby, writeup to come
S0048 Kennedys - after said dinner
1016206 Brewdog - waiting for a different dinner appointment in a different pub-licenced restaurant

Revisit writeup because I feel like it: N0097 Underdog

Every month, I do a post listing the pubs I've revisited in the past month - I can tell from the views that people actually do bother reading these; and it provides some evidence that I don't just chase the new places.

One extremely regular entry on that list is Underdog, on the corner of Capel and Bolton Streets. 

The writeup I have been linking to for it is from August 2016, is very brief, and refers to three incarnations of the pub ago - it having had two different Galway Bay Brewery pubs in it between then and now. 

I don't usually care if I link to an old writeup - the Beer Temple will continue to get a pre-GBB The Oak visit linked forever probably - but this one is so poor I'm updating it; particularly as I'm usually there monthly. 

The physical pub here is a Victorian corner pub, extended in to a modern building at the rear. In the past, I suspect it went in to this building also; for this was a hotel for a number of decades in the early 20th century. The interior is not Victorian, so it isn't on the lists of Victorian pubs - but in this part of the city, most of the pubs are well over 150 years old. It spent a bit of time between pub incarnations as a chain off-licence, before becoming a sort-of craft beer bar nearly 15 years ago. It hasn't moved too far away from this since.

On to the current operations. Underdog is basically the last full craft bar in Dublin that isn't owned by a brewery; and potentially the only non brewery owned bar that doesn't sell Guinness. 

There's a small number of bar staff here - including the owner, all well educated in the product they sell. There aren't really any fixed taps; but there are some near permanent products here - all from Irish or international independent breweries. You'll find something to drink.

The kitchen here hasn't operated as a regular thing since the last Galway Bay era; but it may yet reopen. Until then, if you need food, you really don't need to go far - this section of Bolton Street has multiple interesting and good quality Brazilian places of various kinds, as well as other pubs doing food.