Sinnotts

Basement St Stephens Green Centre, South King Street, Dublin 2

A great big warehouse of a bar, Sinnotts exudes all the qualities I depise about the O'Dwyers Bros manifestations. Low slung, ugly, coated with a veneer of offensive cod-tradtional tat, this is a piss poor alternative to the genuine Dublin pub. An aggressive door policy is meant to keep the riff-raff out but, frankly, they needn't bother. This place could only be improved with a can of super-unleaded and a box of matches.

Cramped and overcrowded at the best of times, Sinnotts is essentially a converted cellar deep within the bowels of the Stephen's Green shopping centre. The unimaginative layout causes much inconvenience when trying to get a drink, negotiating the dance floor, or getting to the toilets.

The walls of this travesty are covered-- and by this I mean every square inch of the place-- with hundreds and hundreds of caricatures. Irish characters, Irish poets, Irish playwrights, Irish writers, Irish sportsmen, Irish gombeens, Irish politicians, Irish rebels, Irish eejits, Irish gobshites, Irish shitehawks and cute Irish whoors, in fact a whole pantheon of Irish shite greets your horrified visage as you stumble blindly about searching for the exit, the bar, the jacks anywhere but this gallery of gurning grotesques. Every jaded hack, shebeen storyteller, drunken playwright, and venal politician is represented on these plasterboard walls. But perhaps most insulting of all is a bronze plaque given pride of place purporting to be some 'James Joyce Dublin Pub Award'. Christ, if you thought there was some downward limit, some absolute zero on the taste scale that could never be achieved, think again. The... James... Joyce... Dublin... Pub... Award. Don't these cretins know that James Joyce's father was a fucking alcoholic? That the young Joyce watched his father pauperise his family? 'Course they didn't; Joyce is nothing to these people. He's not one of the finest writers of the 20th century-- he's a cipher, a wall decoration, one more Oirish icon to distract the punter from the God-awful atmosphere in the modern Dublin pub and keep him occupied whilst the greedy bastard owners fleece him for his hard earned cash.

The crowd are what you would expect in an O'Dwyers establishment: young cubs suckling at the blackened teats of the Tiger. Bloated manifestations off the 'New Affluence' humping, rutting, wallowing in the sodden darkness of this wasteland. Sinnotts is everything a pub should not be. The unholy union of Irish culture and the lunatic heights of venality reached in our overheated, overhyped economic climate have given rise to bastard creations such as this. Once only foisted on unhappy cities in foreign parts, Oirish pubs are now abroad in Dublin city. Mark me, it will not be long before their scabrous forms are seen clinging leechlike to the undersides of shopping centres elsewhere in this fair isle. Parasitic suckerfish attaching themselves to some vast hulking juggernaut of the deep. I shudder at the thought.

As we relentlessly plunder our culture to shill just one more fucking tea towel to some innocent foreign ignoramous, I plead-- nay beg-- with the wilfully blind corporate corpsehumpers out there. How much is enough? How much is enough, you greedy bastards? Old Ireland is dead and gone and good riddance-- you have squeezed every last drop of money out of her, you greedhead maniacs. But you still have us: the unwilling victims in your money-crazed machinations. Vacant eyed devourers desperate for a drink, a dance, a decent night out. Prepared to gorge ourselves to vomiting point on the loathsome bile you serve, prepared to turn a blind eye to your heretical gross debasement of anything worth a damn. How much is enough?

I hope the filthy place collapses under its own crapulence. It deserves nothing less then pitiless scorn for its pompous insipid banality. You have been warned.