The Palace Bar

Fleet Street, Dublin 2

Dublin's Temple Bar area: an unassuming oblong of city running from Westmoreland Street to Parliament Street and enclosed by Dame Street and the south quays. "Dublin's Left Bank" to the self-deluded; to the intelligent, a ghastly, soul-buggering theme park, a gross and sweaty monument to all that is hateful and dead in Ireland today. As Frank McDonald, Environmental Correspondent with the Irish Times and vociferous critic-in-chief of the organised rape of Dublin's architectural heritage, once wryly put it: too much Bar, not enough Temple. And what temples are there in this zone of the accursed are to Mammon and Moloch and not to any wholesome Deities that you or I would care to worship, kind reader.

It was not always the case. The Bastard Kesey himself, if drink or foolish talk accidentally sends him weaving down that dread shit-spattered alleyway he calls Memory Lane, will reminisce at length about the Golden Age of Temple Bar, before it became a circle-jerk party for corrupt property developers and a sanitised freakshow where rich arseholes could go and play at being Bohemian. How well Kesey remembers his first forays into this ill-regarded maze of winding streets lined with faceless warehouses and assorted huckster shops, en route to the late-lamented Alchemist's Head, Dublin's first-- and for a long while, its only-- comics shop. Picture our young hero scuttling down these half-forgotten alleys, eyes darting hither and thither, lest some skagged-out back street abortionist leap from the shadows and cut the fuzzy nuts from his pubescent body with a rusty coathanger.

Temple Bar was like that, at least in Kesey's diseased mind: disreputable, off-the-wall, and slightly dangerous. For it was a place under death sentence. CIÉ, the State-supported monopoly that runs Ireland's public transport system (and whose ideas of quality, hygiene, and customer service have brought nostalgic tears to the eyes of arriving Russian emigrants) had decided it was building a giant bus station there and the whole area was scheduled for demolition. Only the short-term made their homes in the Temple Bar of the late eighties: the weird, the arty, the people who don't quite fit in at the best of times and certainly weren't fitting into the unrelenting tedium and viciousness of those years; the small-time entrepreneurs who catered for this outcast market segment and tried to make an honest buck until recession drove them into bitter exile abroad. And so Temple Bar thrived in its low-key left-field way until the economy started to improve and the property speculators, the bullshitters, and the gangs of lickspittle onanists from assorted State-sponsored Arts and Culture quangos began to take notice. They smelled money and street cred and moved in for the kill. They jacked up the rents, chased out the weird, and gave the place the equivalent of a few smart taps with a cattleprod so it'd be stunned and docile for the old and creepy to defile.

So it goes. Gaze, gentle Reader, gaze into the very depths of Hell as you stand timorously upon the junction of Fleet Street and Westmoreland Street! For while there are many places here that lay claim to being the black beating heart of Temple Bar, Fleet Street can only be its bowel-- the bowel of a pretty young junkie forced to peddle his arse to ugly old men smelling of wintergreen in order to feed his filthy habit. Fleet Street is indeed an ill-used orifice, lumpy with haemorrhoids like Busker's and The Thunder Road Café. A permanent stream of drunken, swaying bodies flows towards you as you stand there. Jolts of panic shoot up your spine like sparks up a Jacob's ladder as you observe this wave of human sewage flow towards you with oblivion in their glassy eyes. You have to get out! Half mad with fear, a snivelling appeal for your mother threatening to burst from your lips, you make for the nearest door and half-walk, half-leap across the threshold. And this is how you might first enter The Palace Bar.

The Palace is the last you'll see of decent civilisation before you enter Temple Bar. It's an old-fashioned pub and that's because it's old, not because its proprietors spent the last six months diving into skips the length and breadth of the country and nailing the garbage thus salvaged to the walls of their establishment. The poet Louis McNiece once spoke of Dublin captivating him with its "seedy elegance". This phrase captures exactly the character of a real Dublin pub, a character that's elusive and quite hard to describe. It's the down-at-heel eccentricity of the college professor with the one shabby old suit that's ten times more elegant than the polyester-blend atrocities affected by the Bright Young Things of his faculty. It's a subdued and unassuming class, for want of a better word, that no superficial barn pub decorated from a "Pubs of Distinction" catalogue will ever touch.

So if it's authenticity you're after, The Palace is already scoring well. Literary connections? The name of Flann O'Brien has been mentioned. Then again, rare is the Dublin pub that hasn't poured a glass for a thirsty hack at some point or other. Onto more pressing things. The Palace itself is long and narrow like many other old pubs. There is a small seated area right at the back, but for the most part, it's standing room only. And it does get pretty packed, so try to stake out your territory as close to the bar as you can. They do a middling-to-good pint of Guinness, once you get your order in; given the numbers that can be jammed into the place of an evening, it can be a chore to attract the attention of the overworked barmen. The lack of seating makes the Palace a good place to meet for a quick pint in the evening after work or before a meal or something (being only around the corner from O'Connell Bridge, it's about as central as you can get) but a protracted stay is not kind to the legs.

There is a small upper bar in The Palace, accessible via a narrow staircase next to the main entrance. The upper bar has more seating but it's not open every night. It can get quite crowded in its turn, but generally speaking it's a good deal quieter and more intimate than the crush downstairs. A word of warning, though: if the place fills up, they do close the door. Drinking in the upper bar one night, I returned from a cigarette-buying excursion to the lower bar to find the upper locked tighter than a drum. I had to ask the barman in the lower bar to ring up and get them to open the door again, which was annoying.

The clientele of The Palace tend to be an older, quieter crowd compared to the hordes of beer-maddened stag-night freaks in Temple Bar. For some reason, The Palace seems to be a fixture for rugby fans, both domestic and foreign. Doubtless I am displaying gross ignorance of sporting history for not knowing why The Palace has a special significance for rugger buggers, but if I was into a game as overtly homoerotic as rugby, I'd keep my mouth shut if I were you. Mind you, the fans that do congregate in The Palace tend not to be the twenty-pints-and-a-rousing-chorus-of- "The-Good-Ship-Venus" variety and for that we should be grateful.

As is the case with many older pubs, the toilets leave something to be desired. It must be said that a lot of my dissatisfaction with the facilities is probably more due to their location in the (cold) basement and the somewhat antiquated plumbing rather than any egregious breaches of the health code. The toilets in The Palace are not sewers; they just seem to be a bit of an afterthought.

To sum up: The Palace is a solid, unpretentious pub of the "old school". It might be a little shabby for some, and it does get uncomfortably crowded at times, but it's welcome surcease from the horrors of the ghastly oldie-worldie barn pubs and cod-Bohemiana of Temple Bar. Limited seating makes it more of a stopover point than a permanent fixture for a night's boozing but you will feel some regret having to leave so soon.