Temple Bar Times: Discovering A Colorful Neighborhood That Thrives On Entertaining
When I close my eyes and picture the Temple Bar neighborhood, which is located between the Bank of Ireland and Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin, it’s before the pandemic and I am meandering down cobbled streets. The nightlife is starting to awaken and restaurants are spilling over with live music and revelers. I am spent after a day of sightseeing and am eager for a good meal as Steph and I head to the Gallagher’s Boxty House. The restaurant, named after a traditional Irish potato dish, has an international reputation for great Irish food and it is packed. Steph graciously lets me sit down in the one empty chair left, while we wait to be seated. When we are led to our table we pass by patrons engaging in animated conversations amidst the clinking of glasses and cutlery. Steph and I are led downstairs and are seated at our table and even down there on the basement level, it is full. We have to raise our voices to consult each other about the menu.
After dinner, we walk by The Temple Bar Pub (established in 1840) and are greeted by happy customers who have just stepped outside and presumably partaken of the many well-known whiskeys from this lively, red establishment. They smile and joke with us in a harmless and free-spirited way - offering to take our photo -and disappear into the night, with their merriment and laughter tumbling after them. The mood is celebratory because Dublin is a beautiful city and it’s liberating to paint the town red.
PHOTO ALBUM: HEADING TO TEMPLE BAR
Now, two years later, in a sober Covid-19 world, I search online for these hospitable Irish establishments, from the confines of my American home. The family-owned Gallagher’s Boxty House is closed indefinitely after 32 years. A lockdown (and a flood in the basement) took a toll. Boxty House owner Pádraig Óg Gallagher said in an interview with The Irish Times, “The city centre is dead, completely dead.” (The business has survived on takeout and delivery from their other location, the Boxty House Kitchen and a brewery in Tallaght.)
I look up the EarthCam video on The Temple Bar Pub website. At 1:58 a.m. on a Saturday morning in Dublin, the streets are empty. The pub’s sign is lit up, but the windows are dark. The website says it is temporarily closed. There is a €14 million Guinness Raising the Bar recovery fund for the hospitality sector that has been helping them stay afloat.
I wish I could be a tourist right now instead of just reminiscing because the loss of the tourism industry has greatly affected Ireland, according to Tourism Ireland Chief Executive Niall Gibbons in a January 2021 article in The Irish Times. “There’s no way to describe the decimation of last year,” says Gibbons. “We had 11.3 million visitors to the island in 2019. That was worth €5.8 billion and supported 325,000 jobs. We estimated there was a fall of 80 per cent last year.”
There is hope, however. With increased vaccinations, lockdown restrictions are easing. Plans are coming together for outdoor dining. I can already hear the boisterous sounds coming back: the fiddle, the sharing of amusing anecdotes about life in raised voices over exuberant crowds, the bursting conviviality of it all.