Tales from Dublin Pubs: Corrigan's Mount Pleasant Inn of Lower Mount Pleasant Avenue

Sam Coll and Andrew Stephens. Sketched by Sam Coll.

Tucked away off the Rathmines road, Corrigan's Mount Pleasant Inn comprises a small bar (with a 20 to 30 cent difference in price) and a large enveloping lounge – not at all a bad place for a romantic date, so long as one doesn't get too fervid and inspire cries along the lines of 'Get a room!'

The pub was formerly under the management of a certain Mr. Barry Cotter, a social climber with six houses and Scrooge-like tendencies. Staff of those days included two doddery gents of a ripening vintage, kindly Robbie with a baritone voice that was made for the radio, and nasty Ciaran who cultivated many grudges and lived with his mother. Both had notoriously shaky grips, yet both insisted on carrying pints to the tables, with much inevitably spilt.

In 2015, following the death of their most loyal customer (sometime chess champion and full-time alcoholic Bernard Michael Palmer[see footnote], it was sold to a pair of Roscommon brothers who brought in new staff.

Ray, an excellent barman, is in charge of a mixed team: competent Nigel, and bumbling Toto who has a lisp, is slow to serve and will invariably forget an order at least once a night. Two other nameless staff members (one of whom, nicknamed Chewbacca, has a disconcerting habit of staring) have been regularly spotted over the bridge in O'Connell's.

We have enjoyed many a giggle mug of Guinness over the years in the Mount Pleasant. The pulled pint is always exceptional. This is due to the lounge not having any Guinness taps at all. All Guinness in the house flows from the same two taps in the bar ensuring a constant and ever steady flow. Blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Corrigan’s!

Regulars comprise a glittering cast of characters, many granted nicknames deriving from Breaking Bad. 'Gale' is a clandestine alkie hidden in plain sight, a mild-mannered youngish chap who works in IT, shy and prematurely greying, falling occasionally into fat whenever he seasonally 'lets himself go'.

'He-Man' is a hatchet-faced mannish woman wino always guzzling the cheapest lager, earning her Masters-Of-The-Universe moniker owing to her greasy straggles of blonde hair and a dirty raincoat. 'He-Man's Friend' is a mousy little thing who never leaves 'He-Man's side.

He-Man and her friend! Sketched by Sam Coll.

'Golden Throat' is a hunchbacked gombeen man with a frighteningly hoarse and raspy voice that would appear to be produced by artificial means whenever he applies pressure to his voice-box – he has also been glimpsed (and heard) in the Portobello over the canal (though his long absence in recent years may suggest that he has since emigrated to the celestial barroom in the sky).

'Hector', otherwise Dick, is a baldie with a monkey's leer and an impressive profusion of hair growing on the back of his neck – 'twould be a brave set of shears would crop those back-locks! He doesn't like foreigners coming into our country and taking our jobs and will vent this view to any who will listen. When he smiles his underbite pronounces and his neck contracts until the lobes of his ears nearly touch the top of his shoulders, and his eyes roll so far to the side he could almost see around himself.

Dick, the baldie. Sketched by Sam Coll.

‘Tuco Salamanca’ is a private and shifty sort of fellow, usually garbed in an oversized black leather trench coat which may or may not be concealing his particular penchant for wearing ladies’ panties in public.

‘The Professor’, known as Pat, is always immaculately turned out in suit and tie with stately silver hair back slicked. He’s in his twinkle years of eighty anon making him the most mature of all the drinking denizens. The Professor, the wise old twig who knows his own trunk, orders a pint amongst the brutes in the bar, then shuffles around to the lounge where he collects his stout, safe in the knowledge that he’s thirty cents the richer. He sings to himself under breath which is incessant until someone breaks the spell by dint of speaking to him. His drinking pattern is unbending. He meanders by moonlight between the Mount Pleasant Inn and O’Connell’s of Portobello.

The Professor, otherwise known as 'Pat'. Sketched by Sam Coll.

One suspects he takes the secret passageway at the end of Bessborough Parade which curls around the Church of Mary Immaculate - refuge of many an alcoholic sinner - and out onto the main road of Rathmines Lower.  The tiny smoking area out the back has various garish cartoons adorning the walls, chiefly Moe the Bartender and other Simpsons characters, but also, bizarrely, racing pundit John MacCritrick.

Andrew Stephens once joined Sam Coll and Sean O’Rourke who were drinking late one St. Patrick’s Day. Sean was stunned to find his sense of gravity misplaced as he parted with his seat and found intimacy with the floor. Eventually, we three made our leave when suddenly, punched by the freshness of air, Sam puked. It was the most dignified act of vomiting ever seen. Silent and swift, he reverently bowed, spilled, and with handkerchief at swab offered up an apology, then sauntered on like nothing had ever happened.

Update as of November 2019

For the very first time in many years, Coll and Stephens boycotted the lounge and sat in the bar to avail of a cheaper Guinness at €4.50 a pint. An eclectic cluster of barmen was found making the city seem to shrink even smaller: Firstly, Coll was served by barman Chewbacca (see O’Connell’s) who was surprisingly courteous and professional: ‘take a seat sir, I’ll bring them down.’ Secondly, off-duty and incompetent barman Toto was in plain clothes and drinking his own supply double-quick. Lastly, and very much least, sitting alone in a haze of self-loathing was the dreadful barman of McGarry’s, Harold’s Cross. His shoulder, it seems, is all too blistered by burden. May he soon find Jesus to give him back his cross.

Update as of June 29th 2020

Appropriately enough, this excellent establishment was the first pub we were able to enter after 105 days of drought thanks to the lockdown imposed by Covid 19 regulations. The pint we drank was the first we had had in a pub since March 15th in Murphy's of Rathmines (see below), and the first civil sup after over three and a half months of Skype sessions and tins in the city's parks. Barman Ray was delighted to welcome us back and his business was booming, as well it might be, an oasis in the desert. Thankfully the 105 minute time limit was not enforced, nor was an obligatory 9 euro meal forced down our throats. All in all, a heart-warming homecoming – we didn't know what we had until we lost it.

FURTHER POSTSCRIPT

Alas, poor Corrigans! They fell a victim to their own largesse. A week later the guards made a raid on them and shut them down for their cheeky disregard of the regulations. When they reopened, a nervous new ethos reigned – overpriced soup and sandwiches were foisted upon one (which, combined with Guinness and tonic water, brought a round for two people to a staggering twenty-six euros!) and last orders were called before ten o'clock. Thus were they chastened.

FOOTNOTE

[1] Bernard Michael Palmer: 1957-2015. A footnote is insufficient to do justice to this giant among pint-men, yet truly a full-scale biography could only go so far. Though we have often heard the sneering dismissal that, 'Go into any bar in this town and you'll find ten Bernards', we have not, in all our lengthy explorations, actually come across another to match him.

A pitiful attempt was made to delineate his character in Sam Coll’s debut novel The Abode Of Fancy (by means of the thin disguise of 'Mr. Albert Potter') but the result is but a sketch, a flattened caricature that does no justice to the man's shabby grandeur and even more terrible pathos, wholly inadequate to the subject's true dimensions and tragicomic power.

At first glance, he would strike you as just another slobbering fatso stuffing himself numbly with poison, captive to the counter's corner – but only a short conversation would reveal an erudition and intelligence far beyond any of his barfly cronies. Bernard often said that he was born out of time – the eighteenth century would have suited him better, and indeed there was something Johnsonian about him, the certainty of his pronouncements and the ponderousness of his bulk, wedded to a quick wit testament to the thin Quixote within, trapped in the frame of a Sancho. He could play chess blindfolded – watching him hunched over the graded board was a spectacle, as he screwed up his flabby features into a gargoyle's grimace, twining and twining his thinning hair before a hand darted out to achieve a quick checkmate.

His skills were not confined to chess – he was also a champion in Go, and made a trip to Japan to take part in tournaments (his great bulk quite towered over the natives whose sushi bars he frequented). He could speed-read at a frightening rate, yet when he wrote or typed anything he seemed a shade dyslexic.

An orphan, he sometimes speculated that his true father was the Archbishop of Cork. His stepmother was abusive but his harried stepfather was 'the only man I ever loved'. He left school at thirteen over a broken arm, and declared ever after, with the pride of the autodidact, that the Rathmines library had been his only college.

In later life an attempt was made, by Michael Coll, to get him into Maynooth University as a mature student – and after initially getting on with some Jesuits, he blew his chance by drinking cans with youths under a bridge and tossing a security guard into a river. He sometimes worked as a bouncer (at what is now the present day Blackbird), but the source of his funds remained a mystery (it was only sadly revealed, posthumously, that he had been sneakily drawing his deceased stepdad's pension, and got away with it for years until some intern noticed the discrepancy – the unseen pensioner must be some one hundred and thirty years old, etc).

He lived around the corner from Corrigan's (the proximity was fatal for such a self-described 'functional alcoholic' as he was), in a basement flat on Mount Pleasant Square, a squalid den overflowing with books and cans and bottles. One could not agree with everything he said ('Joyce is the worst of the great novelists...all Africans are subject to the curse of tribalism...') but there was no doubting it all came from a solid foundation.

He was prone to embellishing his life story with seeming fictions (every anecdote began 'It must have been twenty-five years ago now...'), claiming, among other things, that he had been in the British Army in Bolise at one time and had slit a fellow's throat for raiding his locker to steal his luncheon – o yes, he had violent impulses and a dark streak no doubt. And though he frequently boasted of amorous heterosexual conquests such as would shame an Adonis or Casanova, and towards the fair maidens of Dublin he displayed an old world courtliness (tempered by a dirty old man's grubby seediness and lip-smacking sleaziness), he seemed even more pederastic in practice, revealing an 'Uncle Monty' side to his nature when confronted with one such 'beautiful boy'.

He apparently found some satisfaction towards the end with a Polish lady who liked riding and reading as much as he, but it did not last. Alas, poor Bernard! He died of a massive heart attack in August 2015 – his body lay undiscovered in his flat for the best part of a week until the guards were called to shift the corpse (with morbid hilarity, they blanched at the rotting bulkiness, saying 'They didn't tell us at the training college that this was part of the job!').

His cremated remains were eventually interred alongside his stepparents, in an unmarked plot near the rear of Glasnevin Cemetery. It is indeed a cliché, but I sincerely do not think I shall ever look upon his like again – and since his passing, the world has seemed a lot less colourful. R.I.P.

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