Bar Review: O'Donoghue's, Suffolk St

Bar Review: O'Donoghue's
Suffolk St
Dublin 2


What is Oxegen when it's at home? Oxegen lives on Suffolk Street in a place that used to be the Thing Mote, which was a real thing. It was a humongous mound of dirt and means 'meeting place that is also a mound of dirt' and survived until the 1680s when it was flattened, but this thing mote was slightly further up the road from the (later) pub of the same name, around the tourist office that used to be St Andrew's Church.

I'll bet that really fucked people up just like it does me now. “Where art thou?” “Ye Thing Mote! It hast been fixty minutef!” “Forsooth? I see you not.” “Speak up! Ye madrigals are fierce loud and the pint is nay fit to douse the wounds of a meazel for soothery!” “Alas! Ye are in the publicke house. I am at ye mote of ye literal sorte. Anon.”

Fast forward four hundred yearf. “I'm just in the door – I don't see you.”

“At the back in the pooling area,” which translates as 'smoking area' when predictive text is used correctly. Ring ring. “I can't....hang on, which one are you in?”

I wonder was it a good idea to open a second pub called O'Donoghue's not very far from the real O'Donoghue's and with a similar exterior. I wonder how many tourists, having heard glowing reports of the real O'Donoghue's, wander into this one by accident (I've had to steer people to the correct one, more than once, I should add) and wonder if perhaps that friend who told them about the 'traditional Irish music' maybe is a real asshole after all.

It is my understanding, though, that this O'Donoghue's is a real thing. Smug mammy's boys in polo shirts gnashing gum into pints of lager, bland, pageant-faced girls upholstered by Topshop, and oh, I'm sure someone's always going or coming from Australia, and do they still go on J-1s? But they're all completely maaaaaad, you know. Madouvit! Madsers! And Oxegen is BRILLIANT! Someday they will graduate with their 2.2s in BComm and to Cafe en Seine, lord hear us. Is there room for this many angels in heaven?

This is a pub for people who are, on their Bebo pages, “lovin collage life!!” This is a pub for people who go every day to a place they can't spell. Or, it may genuinely be a place for people who have been or aspire to be cobbled together with bits of paper and glue, although I saw none. It is a rural publican's idea, perhaps advised by a 13-year old, of what 'the young people' are into -- no more 'are ye dancin'?', nosiree.

The table is sticky and the music is so very loud, and it's connected to a dissatisfaction sensor in my brain-pan because every time I think, “This is louder than necessary,” it gets louder. But what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Ho ho, DAVID GRAY!? I can't do it. I'm holding my hands on my ears and I'm trying to make it stop, but it's so loud it's humming up through the leg of the stool and into my posterior and I've really had enough. Babylon, indeed, David.

The original thing mote was also a pile of dirt, did I mention that?

(From Totally Dublin January 2008)