N0800 Forty Four Main Street

Wahey! Its somewhere I actually liked finally! Its a hotel bar, though, so not the most likely place to go for atmosphere - but the food is good.

This is a small hotel located on the Main Street in Swords, and has been in operation since at least the 1980s, originally as the Hawthorn Hotel.The bar makes up the majority of the ground floor and seems to do a solid food trade. Its comfortable and the food menu is a bit more varied than a normal pub menu - I had a goats cheese soup, which sounds like it could go horribly wrong but was executed perfectly.

A lot of hotel bar visits end up either having a dry carvery or sitting at a perch in a lobby bar that really doesn't want outside visitors (or advertises to them, but makes it impractical to use) so this was a nice change - and rare enough for a hotel substantially outside the city centre. The town centre location probably provides the business for them to operate more like a pub, and as the hotel isn't huge I'd guess it would provide a decent proportion of their income.

N0307 The Pound

This is the third pub in a row with a negative writeup - I didn't plan this, they just happened to get visited in this order!

There was an extensive boil water notice affecting a substantial area of and around Dublin recently - well, two of them actually. One thing you could not do with unboiled water was make ice; as this doesn't kill bacteria and they'll still be there.

The barman in The Pound was fully aware of this, but probably not aware that I could hear him (how I don't know - the bar isn't big) when discussing with other customers that they were just asking people if they wanted ice and assuming they knew it was made with unboiled water. I initially assumed they were actually telling people it was unboiled, but a customer who entered after me and asked for ice wasn't told.


If you're going to be that dodgy with food safety, maybe don't talk about it that loudly!

N1116 Clearys

Someone was shot here in 2003, and I vaguely felt it might happen again during my visit - as a relatively aggressive, extremely drunk man was haranguing some regulars (who all left) and then the barman. Eventually it was just the barman, him and me in the entire pub; which was my cue to drink up and get out.

I didn't hear any news of the barmans demise thankfully, so I may have been over-reacting...


The pub was built about 1850 to serve the growing community of Inchicore developing around the railway Inchicore Works, and still carries the name "GREAT SOUTHERN AND WESTERN RAILWAY HOUSE" along the pediment of the building. Significantly less people work in Inchicore Works now, although it is still a substantial operation, and this may be why the pub was incredibly quiet for a Friday evening... or everyone else knew about the drunken twat already.

Its clear that a decent amount of money has been spent on fitout here, probably quite recently too - the exterior of the pub was renovated and painted about 2017 going on Google Streetview anyway. If the volume of patrons when I visited is indicative of the norm I don't see how they'll ever recover that outlay.

N1115 Timothy Crough

This is a rebuilt/replacement premises for an older pub; and is the ground floor of an apartment block. It suffers from this, as its quite larger and a rather odd shape which seemed to have trouble holding an atmosphere.

I was particularly intrigued by repeated signage around the room along the lines of "all drinks ordered at 9pm will be served at 9pm", which suggests there's daytime and nighttime pricing in operation - completely legal but something I haven't seen outside of Temple Bar recently.

There's quite a few pubs in a relatively small area here - all of which I visited before the blog, repeatedly in the case of N1111 Black Lion and N1109 McDowells - and honestly all of which I'd visit again in preference to Croughs. There was nothing strikingly wrong with the place; but the other pubs are just nicer - and the Black Lion does decent grub. My trips to Inchicore are usually football related and often begin in the Black Lion and end in McDowells; but in a previous era when I worked for a CIE contractor, lunch in the Black Lion was also a thing.

N1110 The Glen of Aherlow

I had a few hours to kill on a Friday evening and figured out that hitting the remaining pubs in Inchicore I hadn't been to might be the quickest thing to do - as they're relatively close to the buses back home, and if I did them rapidly enough I could get the last Xpresso service (that run down the Chapelizod Bypass) back rather than have to switch in Lucan.... I ended up switching in Lucan!

The Glen of Aherlow - or Donoghues as most of the external signage says - is the first of the pubs along Emmet Road and despite attending many games in Richmond Park, I had never gone in - N1109 McDowells or occasionally N1124 Tom Taveys getting my business instead normally. 

Externally, the pub looks like it could be in some rural village - a set of rusting petrol pumps wouldn't look out of place on the path as there is more than a little of the look of a garage to it with the curved elements to the roof

What you get inside is an old-fashioned Dublin boozer, not in a bad way however - and not the country pub/grocer/undertaker that the outside might suggest! Cheap pints and a good atmosphere for what was relatively early in the evening made for a decent place to spend some time. 

N1121 Palmerstown House

I've fallen a bit behind in the pub write ups, with an entire page of unfinished stubs in the correct order awaiting me to fill them in, because I couldn't think of anything to write here. So its back to the shorter writeups from a few years ago.

Large suburban pub, part of the Louis Fitzgerald group and as far as I know, housing their head office. Its extremely generic. If you've been in any other Fitzgerald pub it'll be very familar - lots of wood, standard pub knick knacks on the walls, furniture that's all seen better times, sub-par off licence attached. 

December 2019 licence update

Only two changes of note this month

Addition
1015855 - Marlin Hotel, Bow Lane West

Reapperance
S3908 - The Well, Stephens Green West. Formerly Dandelion and off register for many years.