Byrne’s Pub

Greenane

Co. Wicklow

The Wicklow Mountains, windswept and barren. It’s mid-autumn and the landscape is eaten by rust. The trees are gaunt. The sky thick with cloud in some parts, clear and blue in others. The windscreen dashed with rain the size of rice grains one minute, steaming from the sun the next.

Down from the Wicklow Gap, heading towards Glendalough and the slate-coloured sky is now in the rear view mirror. Signposts are thin and buckled. Old black letters in a crooked font, Irish and English. You can’t trust them. They’ve been around too long and have swung round every point of the compass in high winds. 

Glenmalure should be next. On the way to Greenane past Ballinacor, supposedly the site of the ruined castle of Wicklow Chieftain Feagh Hugh O’Byrne, victor of the battle of Glenmalure in 1580. But historians say he wouldn’t have lived in a castle at that time but an earthen fort. 

A crossroads forces a stop and a stare. Four roads, all minor, hedged in by brambles and bushes, none of which look as if they lead anywhere in particular. But they are roads. At least, they’re classed as roads in the county of Wicklow, declared as such for the purposes of section 45 of the Road Traffic Act, 1961.

The Greenane Road is a road for a distance of 860 metres west of its junction with the Ballinderry Road. And the Ballinderry Road is a road for a distance of 780 metres northwest of its junction with the Greenane Road. Run the mental image…. Where is Ballinderry? 780 metres northwest of Greenane presumably. So where is Greenane then? 

You turn to look for guidance and there in the shimmering evening is a statue of Our Lady in a glass case, perched at the bottom of the steepest road. She stares directly downhill towards what appears to be the only other building in this area apart from the odd house, a pub by the name of Byrnes. 

            Sitting outside on a bench painted a weak brown is a man who could also be a statue, his backdrop a cream-painted pub with door ajar. Not a murmur comes from inside. I get out of the car, ask politely for directions and more politely if I could take the man’s photo. It just looks like a perfect moment.

He looks at me, then down at his cigarette.

“Do you want me with the cigarette, or without?”

“Well, you can just hold it in your hand,” I say.

The door of the pub swings further ajar. Homely items are visible inside: a stove, a small television set, some old chairs. It’s not a pub at all.

The man sits upright impatiently and I take a photo.

“Did you get it? Is that enough?”

I thank the man and move on, making a note to come back again and see if that pub is a pub; or was a pub and is now somebody’s house.

It took me a long time to find the place again. I learned that it was indeed a pub and it was indeed in Greenane, a small village that was not far from an outdoor maze in the smaller village of Ballinanty, near Rathdrum.

Eventually, one Friday evening I returned along with two friends. A couple of locals stood outside smoking. A few cars were parked on the verge and the sound of a football match came from a television inside.

The room itself was small and a large cocker spaniel roamed freely between beer kegs, a stove and the few punters’ legs. Behind the bar stood a man who I presumed was the owner, an old but able-looking man, perhaps somewhere in his early seventies. We ordered drinks and stood at the bar, watched by a small group of about five people who stared up at the television, showing a match between Ajax and Panithinaikos. It was mid-summer and I wasn’t sure what match it was, but it was on so we stayed put and avoided impeding the view.

The man returned slowly with pints that had been pulled in front of an old sink that sat beneath a grubby window, one of the few sources of light apart from a fluorescent strip in mid-fit and an unusual candle holder that sat at my elbow. I eventually introduced myself and asked if he was the owner of the pub and was it still belonging to the Byrnes, as the name proclaimed. 

“That’s right,” he said, a little wary. “I’m a Byrne alright, and better than a scald.”

Eventually he grew more chatty and explained, although a bit vaguely, that the pub had been in a Byrne family of some sort for as long as he could remember, and that there were at least three generations of Byrne before him that would have given me the same answer if they were alive, which makes the place about two hundred years old.

Byrnes. And the O’Byrnes, I wonder? There were a lot of them in these parts with similar names. There was the chieftain already mentioned who lived in a castle or a mud fort. There were Byrnes who had become woven into history during the Rising of 1798  – Billy Byrne of Ballymanus and Hugh Byrne of Kirikee Mountain, overlooking Greenan. And the Byrne ‘better than a scald’ family alive today, a few generations in the house next door. Any relation? Unlikely. He doesn’t really look the fighting type. But you never know.

This was the only pub in the area and, as we soon discovered when he broke off and went down to the far end of the bar, the only sweet shop also. A few kids stood just inside the door, their eyes the same level as the bar, stretched on tiptoes, barely peering over the top at the boxes of minerals, sweets and chocolate lying haphazard on the shelves. They purchased some cans of coke and handfuls of sweets and left again in a sprint to divvy up.

The confectionary area was separated by a wooden partition with a large piece of frosted glass, a poster stuck to the glass with yellow sellotape warning of the perils of date rape. I looked outside to where the hills rolled into one another and not a sound was to be heard. Date rape? By whom? A sheep?

Eventually one of the men from outside entered and took a place at the bar beside us, nodding in that short benevolent way that locals greet in Wicklow. A friendly man who didn’t dare drink anywhere but here since it would mean driving, he, along with Mr ‘better than a scald’ Byrne began describing some of the items scattered around the bar, including a pair of ram horns that curled like rope, and a humungous contraption that looked not unlike one of the large contraptions used for pulling ale. It was for taking the tops off bottles, Mr Byrne explained, giving a demonstration of sorts before telling us that in ‘his day’ everything came in bottles, but that the bottles could taste of rust. He then asked us why we were here and was it to visit the outdoor maze up the road in Ballinanty we had come.

“Partly,” I replied. “I’m looking for a friend of mine. He went up there about six months back and he hasn’t been seen since.”

The laughter broke the ice, but punctured the conversation. So heads turned to the out-of-place television high up in the corner. The local then stared up at the TV, murmuring the score between the two teams to himself before casting a general observation.

“Did you know that the Greek team Panathinaikos was founded by an Irish missionary priest in 1908?” he volunteered.

“Really?”

“Yep.”

He points up at the television and tries to pick out one of the Greek players.

“See – his jersey has a shamrock on it. The club was founded by an Irish priest who worked with the poor, and the shamrock was adopted as the symbol afterwards.”

For a while we stare up the TV, bemused by this interesting piece of trivia. But he was only getting started. 

“The German team also honour the Irish,” he says. “Did you ever wonder why their away strip is Green?”

We shake our heads.

“After World War Two, no other country would play the German team except Ireland. So as a mark of respect, or gratitude, green was adopted as their official away colours after the teams traded jerseys at the end of the match.”         

Or maybe once they’d traded jerseys, a green one was all they then had, given  the state of the country after the war. But you can learn a lot in a pub.           

The conversation goes from there to football in general, the Irish team in particular and back to the locality of Greenane, a complicated name for such a small place –  it has at various points in time been called Greenan, Greenaun, Grenan, all derived from the Irish Grianan, meaning a summer residence or a royal palace, taken from the word grian, the sun. The name, supposedly, of the original Camelot. Was this why the recent remake of the battle-filled King Arthur was filmed only a few miles down the road in Glenmalure? Coincidence? No, all myth. Speaking of which, that story about the priest and Panathinaikos? In 1918 Panathinaikos chose the shamrock –  or ‘trifylli’ as it’s known in Greece –  as their emblem on the suggestion of one Mihalis Papazoglou, an athlete from Constantinople who played for Chalkidona and who had adopted the same symbol. The idea was accepted by Panathinaikos’s council and confirmed as the team’s official badge. As for the German team, green is the colour against which their official emblem happened to be set. But it was a good story.

Byrnes is a pub that looks as if it will soon be fighting for its survival. Housing estates will approach from the hills below. New bars will come with them and Byrnes will become a novelty for a while, then a relic, then valued for the land it sits on. Unless the Byrnes fight all that off. 

I paid another quick visit to the pub one evening while it was quiet. The place was completely empty but for Mr. Byrne, a younger lady and a couple of kids all coming and going from the house that made up part of the same building  – two generations by the looks of it. As I stepped into the empty bar, a young boy produced a well-made bow and arrow and pointed it at me brazenly, a defiant, cheeky look stuck to his face. Maybe the pub will survive after all.

    Once the smoking ban in pubs was approved in Ireland, many people believed it would sound the death knell of the old, smokey traditional pubs. They were right. I had an idea to visit as many bars as I could before they died and to make them the subject of a book. I’ll be putting up four of the pubs that I found to be the most interesting. Two are now consigned to history and I’m sure the other two are not that far behind. Cheers.