“I don’t know what’s worse,” says Anton, casting an eye over the stocked shelves behind the bar of Mary’s of Wicklow Street, “coming here for a pint, or coming here to buy fucking hardware.” He holds a bottle of Loctite in front of my face, shaking his head. I try to ignore him while I order two Guinnesses, which I’m told will be dropped down to us.
The pub-cum-hardware shop is as much a part of Irish culture as the indiscriminate mining of shared nostalgia for commercial ends. They may not have had one in your hometown, but you’ve definitely seen one in the films. Wouldn’t it be great to have a pint in one? And how mad would it be if you brought a screwdriver back to the office at the end of lunch hour?
Mary’s is, at the very least — and as I protest to Anton — doing something different in the context of city centre pubs, and it carries off its gimmick pretty well. With such a long and narrow floor-plan to work with, its choice of aesthetic actually makes some sense: all warm, dark wood, high shelves and spartan lighting. It simply wouldn’t feel right as a bright, ultramodern lounge. Which isn’t to say that it feels “right” the way that it is — a pastiche of the community mainstay of rural Ireland — but rather that it achieves a certain pleasurable wrongness, in all of its banality. It’s impossible not to feel faintly ridiculous drinking here, sipping a €4.90 Guinness in a pub that looks like it might still accept Punts. Whether you’re able to enjoy that ridiculousness or not might be a good acid test as to whether or not this pub is for you (but please, tell me you’re able to *discern* the ridiculousness, at the very least!).
Then there’s the clutter. At the back corner of the pub, there is a large pile of bric-a-brac, from scooters to bedpans and an assortment of tools and such in between. It betrays more about Mary’s than it intends to, this bonfire of obsolescence, this burial mound of paraphernalia that once formed the instrumental backbone of a domestic and working life that we can now experience only as the aesthetic choice of a newly-opened Dublin pub. Fredric Jameson saw nostalgia as an ideological means of reasserting, or re-experiencing, the certainties of the past; in Mary’s, we are brought face to face with the one certainty that must have evaded those participants in that distant rural culture it mimics: that of its own death and re-exhibition, in the context of a world that increasingly knows how to bear witness to little else.
“I like that there’s no music playing in here,” says Anton, looking around and soaking up the ambient noise of chatter. I nod in agreement. “Plus,” he continues, pointing at the vintage whiskey advertisement framed above our table, “can you imagine the absolute fucking shite they’d be playing if there were?”
Mary’s Bar & Hardware Shop
8 Wicklow Street, Dublin 2
marysbar.ie
Words: Oisín Murphy-Hall / Photography: Evan Buggle
