THE IRISH PUB

Our Home From Home

Pubs The Crosskeys Inn

As everyone knows, Irishmen like a drink – well, perhaps drinks would be a more accurate way of putting it – and I have to admit I’m no exception to that rule. For more years than I care to remember, I have subscribed to Benjemin Franklin’s view that: “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy,” and I also swear to the old Irish proverb that: “What whiskey will not cure, there is no cure for.”

Why wouldn’t I? Sure wasn’t I reared on it. How the Irish perfected the art of drinking has exercised the minds of clever people world-wide. It’s a mysterious phenomenon, and almost akin to any of ‘the great wonders of the world.’ If only they had bothered to ask me, I would have explained.

You see, drinking in Ireland is the most important element of our culture, and treating the pub as a second home has been a way of life since God was a boy. When the Irish are in the pub, you can be sure of one thing; they are drinking, and I mean real drinking – not like the English or the Americans, who use the pint to adorn the little table in front of them, and to occasionally wet their lips with it. But drinking isn’t the only thing that brings the Irish to the pub. It’s the togetherness thing, the gossip, the banter, the sessions, and of course, the antics and the utterances of so many ‘larger than life’ characters that turns this social exercise into a heavenly ecstasy, banishing their inhibitions and enriching their spirits.

You see then, that the Irish only drink to give them a little escape from reality, and they firmly believe in the old saying: “Reality is an illusion that occurs due to the lack of alcohol.”

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