72) The Cat and Cage of Upper Drumcondra Road, D9

Supposedly licensed since 1690, yet their website boasts that they are 'Dublin's newest gastro pub', which should be sufficient to set alarm bells ringing. Of tangential literary interest since an entire chapter (from Volume II: Pictures in the Hallway) of Sean O'Casey's Autobiography is set here, at a time around about the 1890s when it was but a thatched cottage on the smaller city's outskirts, surrounded by green fields and leafy trees. The young O'Casey and his brothers, fuelled by booze, get into a fistfight with some military men and wind up getting chased by the peelers, escaping only by commandeering a horse and cart.

Sometime in 2011, long before the place's latest foodie reincarnation, Ronan Murphy and Claudio Sansone set out on a long trek to said pub, in the hopes of a stimulating evening of poetry and porter. They were to be sorely disappointed by the quality and tepidity of both, their disappointment rendered doubly sorer by the length of time and expenditure of energy invested in getting to the wretched place. It's a far cry from what it was in the bygone days when O'Casey was a young 'un.

The Cat and Cage in its heyday

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