10) Sweeney's (now: Mulligan and Haines) of Dame Street, D2
A onetime prominent music venue that has since gone through several varying incarnations with consistently diminishing returns. In a former life one was wont to hang around here too often, perhaps drawn in by its open smoking area which looked onto Dame Lane and which proved addictive due to the varying human and animal types who passed through, many drawn by the whiff of hashish and the supposed leniency of the management that lent the otherwise unremarkable joint an enchantingly familial atmosphere the longer one lounged and partook of the banter – repeated custom was always rewarded with the personal touch and free pints were offered if one looked downcast (all since gone with the wind and replaced with no-nonsense corporate cool).
The 'sound' staff included engaging barmaid Sandra Ball and benign barman Sean O'Neill; regulars included poet and Aspergers spokesman Philip Anthony Kenny, a Ginsberg and Wittgenstein enthusiast and something of a pub mascot; fellow Aspergers-enjoyer and cat lover Philip Bradley (the subsequent victim of a violent street assault by thugs); cartoonist Dylan Edwards; homeless poet Paco ('It's easy to be kind when you're having fun'); the wheelchair-bound worryingly withered and subsequently departed Dessie (whom one was once obliged, in the spirit of passing a test, to wheel to the grocery on errands, enduring an abusive litany of complaints and spillages en-route); no-nonsense house painter and heavy drinker Tristan Tormey; the grizzly and raspy-voiced Dermot Doran, the dipsomaniac brother of the famous Eamonn who once owned a noxious Temple Bar super-pub, since shut down and gone to sad seed; Solo Nojo Yves, a Cameroonian musician with a singularly manic performing style, his bouncy beats augmented by the quantity of reefers it was his wont to readily roll; dyslexic busker Anthony McHugh (the subsequent inheritor of a significant legacy and subsequent distributor of excess amounts of said legacy); actress and rocker Chloe Doody, etc. One's blinkered vision was no doubt rose-tinted at the time, but ah sure, 'twere grand while it lasted - and certainly preferable to the crap that came after.
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