255) The Lombard Pub and Townhouse of Pearse Street, D2

Another overlooked outlier which failed to make the list until the oversight was noted very late in the day, and thus hastily reinserted. Not surprising, since it's fairly forgettable though not actively horrible – the views of Pearse and Lombard Street East are pleasant on a sunny day. For about a fortnight in 2008, it was the go-to for a trio of freshmen misfits, Andrew Stephens, Ronan Murphy and the diabolical Iain Mullins, a campy wastrel with a loud laugh, a dispenser of much bitchy gossip who went on to haunt many a box office and was far more theatrical and flamboyant than any actor gracing the stages.

Iain Mullins displays his loud and unforgettable laugh - ‘HAW HAW HAW!’

The Lombard was also the scene for a seeming supernatural episode in early 2015, wherein Sam Coll, neither drunk nor on drugs, talked for some minutes with an old man who he believed to be the apparition of his dead grandfather. The incident, while eerie, can still be explained away – Coll was having a minor breakdown at the time and was in a highly suggestible state, prone to believing in random resurrections – while the old man he encountered, though not the literal ghost of granddad Coll, was nonetheless an uncanny doppelgänger, the very spitting image of the departed professor, a lookalike who was enough of a good (or cruel) sport to humour the deluded youth for a few minutes, playing along for the sake of his jaded and superannuated craic. So much for mystery. So much for the Lombard.

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