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People around the world this weekend will be seeking out their local Irish pubs to join in the revelry associated with Ireland’s national holiday, Saint Patrick’s Day, on March 17.
For one Irishman, however, a visit to his country’s outposts abroad isn’t an annual treat, but a way of life.
Colm Dalton, from County Kerry, is on a mission to visit every Irish pub in the world and has so far made it to 97 pubs in 47 countries. He documents his travels on his Publican Enemy blog and it’s taken him everywhere from Jakarta to Krakow to the Azores.
CNN Travel joined him in The Woodbine pub in Finsbury Park, a North London neighborhood with a strong Irish history, to find out what he’s learned — and why he’s doing it.
“I did one trip, and I just loved it,” says Dalton of his first adventure seven years ago in Bilbao, Spain, “a beautiful, beautiful city.”
In the tiny Wicklow Arms pub, he made new friends galore — including a man who knew Dalton’s father as his postman back in Kerry — and stayed the whole night for a lock-in. (That’s when the doors close and a select few stay on for a private party).
From that point on, Dalton’s fate was sealed. “I just said, ‘This is great. I’ll continue it, and I’ll just try to go a different place every time,’” he explains. “I love to see how someone has interpreted the Irish pub, and (if it’s) a faithful interpretation.”
The London-based university lecturer had an upbringing that prepared him well for life as an international pub connoisseur.
He grew up in Fenit, a tiny village with “one shop and five pubs” on the north side of Tralee Bay, looking out over the Atlantic. His parents are musicians and have long played traditional music in the rural pubs for which Kerry is famous.
It’s a “beautiful part of Ireland” and the pubs are “by default, lovely,” he says. “But I think, as well, when you live in Kerry, you live by the sea, so there is an element of wanting to travel and go out a little bit, because you’re facing across to America.”
In countries where waves of Irish emigrants settled in the 19th and 20th centuries, such as Britain, North America and Australia, there are many pubs with authentic Irish history.
The Irish are also a people who’ve turned up in most corners on Earth, and many of them have opened pubs, so a true slice of Limerick can unexpectedly be found in Lima or a piece of Dublin in Dubai.
Ersatz Irish-themed pubs are everywhere too, however, having boomed as a marketable commodity in the 1990s and proliferated ever since.
The Loch Ness pub on the French island of Corsica is one of the most egregious examples he’s visited, says Dalton, what with Loch Ness being in Scotland, an entirely different country.
If the pub is named after an Irish surname, that’s a good sign, says Dalton, as it suggests it was named after an owner or family.
The Irish do pubs “amazingly well,” says Dalton, when pondering just how Irish pubs became so popular internationally. “We have the hospitality, the atmosphere, the being generally very nice and friendly.”
He highlights also that the best pubs are fiercely independent and as unique as someone’s home. “It’s their house and you’re a guest there,” he says. “You’ve got to be able to control a pub.” It’s about people management, rather than customer service.
In terms of atmosphere, “music is integral,” says Dalton, and it’s far more important than the emphasis that is often put on alcohol. “I see the pub as a nice space, so it doesn’t instantly go with me to excessive drinking. It’s more the space and the people.”
Dalton now often goes on his trips abroad with his partner, but at the beginning he went on his own and “you just end up talking to people.” This cultural exchange has been key to the experience, with different crowds being drawn to the pubs in different countries.
In European countries such as Italy, France and Germany, “the Irish pub is seen as the alternative pub,” he says, where students and backpackers can “live out their James Joyce, the Pogues dream.”
In southern Spain, where many British expats choose to spend their later years, it’s “retired people just enjoying a nice pint in the sun.”
Further afield, as he found in Kazakhstan and Indonesia, Irish pubs are “a little bit high status” and a popular choice with business people, due to the expensive imported beers and Western appeal.
“To be an up-and-coming modern city, you have to have an Irish pub,” he says. “It’s very international, it’s very touristy, where, like, all the expats go.”
In Malmö, Sweden, he visited a pub that was “really wild … they were dancing on the table, literally,” which went against his perception of calm, well-behaved Scandinavians.
He spoke to one reveler and she explained, “We love the Irish pub because it gives us an excuse to go mad.”
In countries with a reputation for being reserved and rational, such as Germany or Japan, Dalton finds that the romantic illusion of the Irish as being “rebels” who “don’t care about things like taxes and, like, laws” is “very attractive for them.”
Then there are places where there is a shared musical connection, such as in the States, where country music has links to Ireland’s folk traditions. ”Things about the countryside, farmers, rural banjos, you know, fiddles, that’s our culture as well,” he says.
“I think American bars are very good. I was in one in Marfa, Texas, called the Lost Horse Saloon and live music was the key,” he says.
As for Austin, Texas, with its famously eclectic music scene, its bars reminded him most powerfully of Galway city, in Ireland’s very own wild west.
In Brazil, he says he visited an “authentic” bar in São Paulo called O’Malley’s, where the local Brazilian music session, with “people sitting in a circle with, like, drums and a little guitar and stuff like that” was very similar to the Irish style.
Dalton has recently visited Estonia and Iceland and the far-flung Faroe Islands, in the North Atlantic, are top of his wishlist. He also wants to visit O’Kelly’s Bar in Guantanamo Bay, although he admits that might be a tricky one for him to gain access to.
In Africa, he’s been eyeing up Bubbles O’Learys in Kampala, Uganda. The southernmost Irish pub in the world is The Dublin, in Tierra del Fuego, at the tip of Patagonia and close to Antarctica.
As for the highest Irish pubs in the world, there are two contenders for that crown: Paddy’s Irish Pub in Cusco, Peru, and Namche Bazaar in the foothills of the Himalayas. “I’d be happy with either one,” he says.
Given that the Irish Pubs Global Federation estimates that there are at least 6,500 Irish pubs worldwide, Dalton concedes that he might not achieve his goal of visiting every single one.
“I have to agree that I probably won’t,” he admits with a grin, “but I do think that I would have a very good time attempting it.”
