The Gurriers' Arms

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 Ballymagaleen Tourist Board’s Book of Necessary Warnings.

(Formerly The Black Swan, The Nook & Cranny, The Harp & Haddock, The Leprechaun’s Elbow, etc.)
“Authentically inauthentic since 2022.”

Vincent and Mary Gallagher, both Northside Dubliners and both of a credulity rarely seen outside pilgrim shrines, are the unfortunate custodians of this establishment.

Having inherited their respective family homes (both ex-corporation houses), they sold them to Vulture Capitalists for what Giles calls “thirty pieces of post-code” and bought The Black Swan, unaware that the Swan had long since sunk.

The pub’s previous owners had been creative with the accounts — to the point of fiction — and the Gallaghers soon discovered they had purchased not so much a business as a moral fable.
Neither had ever poured a pint before; both now do so badly.

The Gurriers’ Arms is that worst of Irish phenomena: the themed Irish pub in Ireland itself.
The walls are festooned with reproduction road signs (“Sláinte!”), tin advertisements for extinct biscuits, and framed photos of American tourists from the 1990s smiling beside sheep they did not own.

The soundtrack, chosen by Mary, rotates endlessly between U2, The Cranberries, B*Witched, and The Corrs, creating an acoustic purgatory of perpetual mid-tempo optimism.
There is no bar counter — merely a distressed timber service island imported from a liquidation sale in Marbella.

The menu is laminated, static, and dispiriting:

• Beef & Guinness Pie (unrelated to either)
   
• Irish Nachos (a crime against both cuisines)
   
• Vegetarian Boxty Burger (neither vegetarian nor boxty)
   

Every dish tastes faintly of microwaves and regret.

By day, The Gurriers’ Arms is eerily empty except for one elderly regular who insists it used to be “a grand house before they painted it the colour of diarrhoea.”
By night, it is invaded by stag parties from Manchester, hen groups from Essex, and the occasional post-American tourist couple seeking ‘real Ireland’, which they mistake for the smell of spilled lager and dettol.

Giles remarks that it’s where “Brits come to finish what Temple Bar began.”

If Ballymagaleen had a moral geography, The Gurriers’ Arms would be its Inferno — a cautionary tale about what happens when capitalism meets kitsch and neither wears protection.
It is the anti-Dooley’s, the un-Norman Conquistador, the dark mirror in which authenticity sees its own parody.

Giles enters only under duress — usually when investigating rumours of counterfeit Bushmills or to retrieve lost visitors from the Poetry Festival.
He calls it “the gastroenterological twin of Hell’s Waiting Room.”

Giles (on the beer):

“Flat, warm, and morally ambiguous.”
 

On the décor:

“It looks like a Dublin Airport pub designed by an algorithm with chronic nostalgia.”
 

On the proprietors:

“Good people, tragic in their optimism — the sort who’d buy the Titanic if it came with free parking.”
 

In fairness, the Gallaghers mean well. They smile, they clean, they count the till nightly as if prayer might balance it.
And once, during the floods of ’23, Mary gave free soup to stranded tourists and was almost canonised by the Connacht Tribune.

But even the angels avoid The Gurriers’ Arms after dark.