Extract

Aoife Carrigy

The Irish Pub

In 2007, as the roar of the Celtic Tiger was starting to falter, a young Darran Cusack of Mulligan’s of Poolbeg Street – the self-proclaimed ‘home of the pint’ – won a DIT Cocktail Challenge for his Jameson-based creation, ‘Darran’s Delight’. Open to Dublin Institute of Technology hospitality students working as bartenders, the competition was conceived ‘in direct response to the growing demand for new cocktails and exciting new drinks’. Other establishments represented included the Russian-themed Pravda, one of the sprawling ‘superpubs’ that had come to dominate Dublin’s pub scene in the preceding decade, owned by multi-venue groups and known for their vast capacity and affluent young clientele. Also represented was The Four Seasons Hotel, name-checked in Ross O’Carroll-Kelly’s 2007 satirical Dublin travel guide for the ‘uber-cool Ice Bar and its famous range of outrageously priced Mojitos’. Darran Cusack, however, represented the third generation of the publican family behind Mulligan’s, proud bastion of what remains a diminishing breed of staunchly traditional pubs.

What had for decades been a standardised social drinking scene typified by traditional pubs predominantly selling beer and whiskey and, increasingly, other spirits like vodka had diversified during the previous decade of prosperity. The pervasive influence of US television show Sex and the City had ushered in the age of the Cosmopolitan and related cocktails. Irish drinkers were demanding new drinking experiences and new venues in which to experience them.

In the early 2000s, at the peak...