This is the still extant bar of a former hotel (that is now an
unrecognised university); you may think this pub is just in a small building beside the former and hefty City Arms Hotel - but it extends underneath the hotel building for quite some way, and is actually a rather large premises.
The main building has quite the history - having been the home of the Jameson family, and with its once large gardens converted in to the
city's cattle markets - now long gone, but which were important in the development of Stoneybatter as we know it today.
It became a hotel in the 1870s or so, and ran as such for about 100 years. During this time period, it features in Ulysses, as a former workplace of Molly (and residence for her and Leopold) Bloom.
The cattle market trade would have been a very significant element of the trade - there are references to people being refused service for not being cattle dealers, potentially during the time of a specific exemption order to allow early trade; and the
closure in 1971 of the markets presumably hugely impacted this trade. A nearby 60s office building, Park House, is often claimed to have been under construction as a modern hotel for this area of the city before a late conversion to offices before opening - so there was certainly not a lot of business going (assuming this oft-repeated claim is actually true)
The hotel ceased hotel services at some point in the 1970s or very early 80s - it is hard to tell, as the bar was often still referred to as the Hotel until the 1990s; but newspaper archive entries for conventions, auctions and other things that happen in hotels tail off in 1977.
Francis Clarke appears on a licence transfer document in 1978, with a planning application in his name in 1981 to convert the ground, first and second floors to office use. This would not have affected the bar which occupies only the basement, and a separate building
(as an aside, as far as I can tell
1013026 Dominick Inn is also the surviving bar of a gone hotel - in this case the now demolished Midland Hotel next door)
The pub traded, at least in part, as Leopolds Disco Bar, in the late 1980s; a reference to their former fictional neighbour.
The Saor-Ollscoil was founded in 1986, but appears to have moved in to the old hotel building in 1994. A 1992 retention permission request for the hotel function room to be changed to a printing studio would suggest there were other office uses in between the hotel closure and 1994
Dragging ourselves away from the building history, and on to the present day pub - my impression was of a decent Dublin local, with a reasonable number of locals in for a mid week night; albeit probably boosted by a Liverpool game on TV.
Veering back to history - some of the pubs history is still visible, in the form of a reminder of beer long since sold - a Perrys of Rathdowney shield on the backbar. One of the
many breweries that Guinness bought and merged, directly or indirectly, in the 20th Century.
