Here's Peat in Your Eye

I saw a piece in the news the other day - a Washington Post article picked up by The Boston Globe - on how the rural pubs in Ireland are dying off at a rapid rate.

The Vintners' Federation of Ireland, which represents rural pubs, said the number of pubs outside Dublin has dropped from 6,000 to 5,000 in the past three years. Some estimates suggest the number may soon dwindle to 3,500.

This is no surprise, given the amazing growth of the country's economy - and the attendant social and cultural changes - that has occurred over the last couple of decades.

As with most change, this one is a mixed blessing.

The closing of the "local" - often the only place in a small town, other than the church, where people can get together - truly represents a loss of an important cornerstone of Irish culture. For older people - lacking the inclination or (often) the money to adapt to something new - it's a rent in the social fabric that is not likely to get repaired.

On the other hand, some of those rural pubs were pretty damned dreary and god-awful.

I remember dropping in to one pub in Port Arlington - where we had a few hours stopover between trains - that was grimy, smelly (smoke, porter, piss), and where the window sills were strewn with the carcasses of dead flies.

Still, for the locals, it was easy to see that this was the place to go when they wanted a pint, some conversation, a bit of a sing-song, a step out on the dance floor.

Rural Ireland can still be pretty grim and lonely, and the pubs are often all that stands between someone and profound social isolation.

It was, of course, easy to see the decline in pub culture coming.

When I first went to Ireland, the music sessions invariably ended with the playing of the Irish national anthem - a sweet touch that is almost unimaginable in The States, even in the most flag-swinging precincts.

I haven't heard "Soldiers Are We" played to close out a session in a long while.

Then there was the sign I saw in a Dublin pub: "Ladies, please mind your pocketbooks."

Just another big city reminder that someone might be out to lift your wallet. (Come to think of it, that Dublin pub was really something more of a fern bar - living, breathing ferns enabled by the ban on public smoking. Yet another forerunner of the decline of the pub.)

Another time a favorite pub of mine in Galway had brought in a TV so folks could watch an important rugby match. I observed that everyone under 30 had pulled their short stools over to the TV set, while everyone over 30 stayed sitting at the bar, at tables, or in the snugs chatting. This is not a change for the better, I thought at the time. Go back, go back.

This was the exact same thought I'd had when a cab driver proudly boasted that the first shopping mall was going up outside of his city.

Go back, go back.

But why should they go back?

Ireland has become more affluent, more cosmopolitan, and more sophisticated over the years.

The Irish no longer go abroad for work, they go abroad on vacation, taking cheap flights on RyanAir to Montpelier, Morocco, and Malaga.

The Irish no longer export their young, they import someone else's. Last time I was there - September 2006 - most of the waitstaff in hotels, restaurants, and - yes - pubs was from Eastern Europe.

The Irish no longer have to poor mouth. Sure, there are still poor people, but the country itself has become unimaginably rich - not just in comparison to the Ireland that our grandparents and great-grandparents left in droves, but to the Ireland of the 1970's with it's no central heat and waxen toilet paper.

And the Irish are under no obligation to provide us tourists with a way to reconnect, however superficially and temporarily, with the Ireland our ancestors last saw when the townspeople held an American Wake for them before they came over here to start a better life.

Still, especially for the "old ones" left behind by the high-tech working, cell-phone sprouting, RyanAir flying, sushi-eating brave, new Ireland, the death of the local pub has got to seem like a death in the family.

Only now there's no place to gather after the funeral.