A Place Apart, In Its Own Time: the Irish Pub As Portrayed in John McGahern's Short Stories

1 and of McGahern's appreciation for Synge's Aran, Kavanagh's Monaghan and Joyce's Dublin amongst other expressions of whatMcGahern himself once described as an island containing thirty-two independent republics. 2As Kiberd explains it, the imposed ideals of 'nation' or even 'county' were arbitrary constructs to a man such as McGahern who had grown up criss-crossing the Leitrim-Roscommon borders on his bicycle and for whom, 'the real unit of culture was the parish, the local church spire being its epicentre and the sound of its bells marking out the limits of its intimate, familiar world'.(xvii)In one essay within that collection, 'Whatever You Say, Say Nothing', McGahern writes that in the 1950s, 'people did not live in Ireland' but rather in 'small, intense communities' that 'could vary greatly in spirit and character, even over a distance of a few miles'.( 130) And again in his beautiful non-fiction homage to County Leitrim, 'The Sky Above Us'in which his home county is evoked as 'a place apart', at least a hundred miles from everywhere (19) -McGahern depicts a geography in which 'county divisions mean little' but where it is 'each single, enclosed locality that matters'; here, local people share a 'passionate interest' in the news of their locality and a distinct disinterest in anything beyond.( 24) That local news is sought out with relish, as in McGahern's loving description of Mohill town in winter when the country folk gather to do the late-night Saturday shop: 'When the shopping is done, they go to the bars to meet the people they know and to discover the news, each locality to its own bar'.(26) If the spire was the epicentre of each of those communities, then local pubs were a tribal gathering point and social mart in which that vital currency of local news could be exchanged.That tribalism might be dictated by the townland you hailed from, but it also might stem from old civil war politics.In the village of Fenagh in South Leitrim, 'two bars watch one another across a road: one Fianna Fil, the other Fine Gael', and the public phone box would be positioned outside 1