The Future of the British Pub

Last week The Guardian addressed one of the truly vital questions of our time: What is the future of the British pub? As an aficionado of pub life from my time traveling across and living in the UK it's a question near and dear to my heart. Clearly two alarming trends have been taking place. One has been the consolodation of power of chain pubs, ersatz representations of the real thing that lack history, charm, and ambiance. The second trend, perhaps tied to the first, is the death of the traditional pub. This is less a concern in cities like London than it is in villages across the UK (and Ireland as well) where once even the smallest village had one or more pubs where people could while away their time in food and fellowship over a pint.

Eire - Real, Imagined

I love Ireland. I'm not a fetishist for a mythic romanticized version of the country, but like many who have spent enough time there to feel as if I know the place, I have a desire to find a little niche of my own. This article captures some of the paradoxes of looking for a "real Ireland" when real Ireland might be right there before you. The author focuses on Counties Galway and Clare, which is wonderful, and where I lived (County Galway) for a while a few years back.

Whatever you do, avoid telling your friends about the Dingle Peninsula. It is one of the greatest places in the world, and the last thing we'd want would be for a bunch of tourists to overrun it.*

*Too late in the summer months.

Irish Sport, Irish-American Identity

The Boston Globe Magazine has a fascinating article on the (fading) role of Irish sports in Boston's Irish and Irish-American communities.

Twenty-five years before ground was broken on Fenway Park, in 1886, the first Gaelic football match was played on Boston Common. Since its founding in 1884, the Boston Northeast Gaelic Athletic Association has done more than organize these matches. It has nourished and spread Irish culture and political viewpoints and provided a critical economic and social safety net to new Irish immigrants. “On a psychological level, it has been hugely significant, particularly for those of a rural background coming to a heaving, busy metropolis,” says Paul Darby, a senior lecturer in the School of Sports Studies at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland. Darby, who’s working on a book about the Gaelic Athletic Association in the United States and Canada, came to Boston in the late 1990s as a guest player for the Boston-based Armagh-Notre Dame club and experienced the phenomenon firsthand. “It’s tremendously reassuring to find a group of like-minded people playing games you would have played back home. In a way, it feels like coming home.”

Not surprisingly, the GAA in Boston and other US cities depends almost exclusively on Irish-born players to fill its rosters. But today, the flow of Irish immigration to the United States is ebbing. According to the Irish government, nearly 14,000 people, most returning Irish emigrants, moved from the United States to Ireland between 2000 and 2005. The Irish-born population in this country dropped by 18 percent, to 128,000, between 2000 and 2004, according to US Census figures. The Boston GAA, the largest member league outside Ireland with 22 clubs, has seen an even more precipitous decline. The league has lost nearly 700 players, or 35 percent of its membership, since 1999.

Gaelic sports are fascinating. Having spent enough time in Ireland to develop a basic familiarity with hurling and Gaelic football I like the idea of this sort of cultural transferral coming across to Boston and other irish-influenced cities. But it should not be surprising that these games have only a tenuous hold on American communities. In many parts of Ireland they do not even reign as they once did.