273) Slattery's of Upper Grand Canal Street, Sandymount, D4

The typeface of the sign suggests a chain of the same lineage as Slattery's of Rathmines, though this is far inferior. (Their website calls it 'The World's Greatest Pub', which is beyond ridiculous.) Five roads merge and a good view of traffic can be obtained from an outside seat, if the hum of vehicles and splutter of exhaust is your thing. The proximity of the Aviva stadium down the road accounts for the emphasis on sport. The barman on duty (during our single visit) warmly recommended his local pub as having the cheapest Guinness in Dublin – sadly, when finally we reached this said local many moons later, the exterior was so off-putting and thoroughly obnoxious that we couldn't be arsed to go in, to hell with comprehensiveness (the ugly pub in question is Timothy Crough's of Emmet Road, Inchicore - thus named, thus shamed). 

Pair of smug suits have a good laugh over some client they fucked over

And speaking of naming and shaming! During the shooting of 2000's Ordinary Decent Criminal (a shambolic fictionalization of the Martin Cahill story), Slattery's was often frequented by the film's star Kevin Spacey, at the very height of his career long before his later disgrace and Hollywood exile. Two previous Academy Awards notwithstanding, Spacey nevertheless affected a singularly lousy and unconvincing Irish accent onscreen, one that would not pass muster in a college play. He was reputedly often accompanied to this bar by young male costars for whom he afterwards threw lavish (if not orgiastic) parties in his plush digs. The waggish Dublin gossip of the time had it that our local rising star Colin Farrell consented to shagging/being-shagged-by(?) a besotted Spacey in exchange for a small part in the film – the beginnings of our Castleknock Colin’s own rise in the business, and a forecast of Spacey's subsequent and spectacular fall from grace in October 2017.

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