In the pubs of Dunmore, the glasses of Guinness gather dust and the barrels doze off. Sobriety and boredom have gripped the locals, which the coronavirus is robbing of the heart of social life in rural Ireland.
The long closure of drinking establishments hits the 3,000 souls in the village and its surroundings with full force.
Normally, customers “drink their pints along the counter like that, to talk politics, the news of the day, understand what’s going on in their own lives,” says pub boss Joe Sheridan, 49, as he unlocked the gates of his settlement in the Galway region (west) village.
“There are people who tell me here what they wouldn’t tell their doctor about,” he says. With the ads closed, “we see people carry the misfortunes of life on their faces”.
In his wood-paneled establishment, Mr. Sheridan finds a pile of mail and the musty smell of the pub at a standstill.
On the walls, group photos, sports memorabilia and dusty bottles. So many testimonies of the role of the pub in local life: common room, museum and sort of discreet collective catharsis for this corner of Ireland.
Irish pubs closed on March 16 as the country braced for the coronavirus which has killed a total of 1,777 people. After 15 weeks of hibernation, those which serve to eat were able to reopen. The reopening of those which are only used for drinking is constantly postponed, and now scheduled for September 13. The industry estimates that half of Ireland’s 7,000 pubs are still closed because of the “longest lockdown in the European Union”.
“The vast majority of these pubs are small rural establishments run by families, who call their customers by their first names”, recently underlined the head of the Federation of Irish pubs, Padraig Cribben.
Rural pubs have their own character, modest in size, simply decorated and full of families and friends.
Many of them are only for drinking. Only one of Dunmore’s six pubs was able to reopen by partnering with a takeaway outlet to offer on-site dining.
“Oil on fire”
In rural areas, many find breakfast the main meal, preserving an uninterrupted evening for the pub.
Historically, these establishments have played the role of grocery store, hardware store, filling the infrastructure gap through petty trade and mutual aid.
In Dunmore, three pubs even still act as funeral directors: when a regular dies, they organize the funeral, the deceased’s pint companions dig his grave.
“This is the ‘meitheal’,” explains Mr. Sheridan, “it is an Irish word for a group that forms to work together voluntarily”.
The confinement “puts a mess in the traditions that have been built over the generations”, he laments.
The village of Dunmore, nestled in the heart of improbably green fields surrounded by stone walls, has only 600 inhabitants.
The outsider might think his six pubs are in fierce competition, but Mr. Sheridan sees each as nodes of a supportive ecosystem with different vibes, which the locals navigate between.
If the decline of the rural population is nothing new, the coronavirus “throws oil on the fire”, estimates the boss, also elected local.
In the houses scattered outside Dunmore, the pub patrons, many older men, spend their time alone.
There is little more than walks to break the monotony of the days, with little chance of social interaction, and a visit from the postman.
“There is nothing here to look at other than the lamp, like a moth,” says Brendan Jordan, whose three or four weekly visits to the pub give the 51-year-old a bit of a break. takes care of her disabled sister.
“They isolate us here in the countryside and nobody cares,” plague John Hussey, a 52-year-old single farmer. “They killed everything in rural areas. “