The news that an unnamed Dublin pub was charging €8 for a pint and €12 for top shelf beverages (cover charge not included) on New Year’s Eve came as something of a shock to staff at the Irish Times, who deemed the story suitably newsworthy for their front page. Not having spent much time drinking in Dublin city centre in recent years, I read with interest in an attempt to find out whether it was good or bad news.

Considering the staggeringly large amount of money I had haemorrhaged throughout the course of three nights of pre-Christmas roistering in Dublin, it briefly occurred to me that the article in question might actually be a gushing tribute to the largesse of some anonymous publican who had slashed his prices for the night that was in it, but of course it wasn’t. The tone was one of thinly disguised outrage and reading between the lines the message was clear: “Bastards! Bastards! Bastards!”
Now I can’t speak for anyone else, but for an outlay of €12, I would expect my vodka and tonic to be served up in the Ardagh Chalice, accompanied by shards chiseled from the iceberg that sank the Titanic and a slice from a lemon that was hand-picked, approved and sliced in front of me by the man from Del Monte himself. Nevertheless, for reasons best known to themselves the paper chose not to name and shame the pub in question, thus depriving vast swathes of their readership the chance to never, ever darken the doorstep of these brass-necked rip-off merchants again.
Of course there are those that will argue with considerable justification that anyone stupid enough to (a) go carousing in Dublin city centre on New Year’s Eve (b) pay an admission fee to a pub and (c) willingly hand over double the usual extortionate price for a drink on the same night is a mug who deserves to get fleeced for every cent he or she has. After all, similar thinking provides the cornerstone of the kind of logic that has seen phrases such as “finders keepers, losers weepers” enter common parlance as defence for the indefensible.
During my three nights out in Dublin in the run-up to Christmas, I spent the guts of €300, without once setting foot in a nightclub or drinking anything more poncey than a pint. Having been systematically ripped off by a succession of taxi-drivers, barmen and restaurateurs, I finally high-tailed it to the sanctuary of the homestead in Birr, still agog at the apparent willingness of Dubliners to tolerate the extortionate price of going out boozing in their own city. Obviously, those of you who have never travelled further south of Lucan would probably prefer being ripped off on a nightly basis to the shame of having to call some redneck midlands backwater home. Well, consider this – in the 10 nights that followed my sojourn in Dublin I got far drunker on a lot less money during a bender that incorporated several lock-ins, no end of unsolicited free “Christmas pints” and an impromptu two-hour Mundy acoustic session that was staged free of charge in a mate’s living room.
Beat that.
Almost inevitably, however, Dublin bit back. And how. Checking in at the Ryanair desk on my way back to Blighty, I was informed by the clerk of the scales that, weighing in at 18 kilos, my bag was three overweight. I had several options, it seemed. Jettison the equivalent of two bags of flour in clothes or footwear, or else pay a surcharge of €18 for my excess baggage. Thanking my lucky stars that I’d opted to stuff the five kilos of heroin I was transporting up my arse rather than into the suitcase, I opted to pay the money and chalk it up to experience. And to be fair it wouldn’t have been too bad if my nose hadn’t been repeatedly rubbed in it from the moment my flight took off to the moment it touched down in London.
Tardiness in the boarding stakes meant that I was forced to sit in the middle of a row of seats. Not good for a kick-off. Wedged into the seat on my left was a fat, sweaty, huking brute of questionable hygiene who weighed a good 30 kilos more than me, but who wasn’t forced to pay anything extra purely on the grounds that his excess baggage was contained in his capacious stomach, pendulous man-breasts and corpulent arse, rather than his luggage.
On my right sat a young mother with a babe in arms. Admittedly, it probably didn’t weigh a great deal more than three kilos, but it was almost certainly travelling free of charge and what it lacked in weight it more than made up for in volume. For 45 minutes it bawled non-stop before nodding off shortly before we landed. And shortly after it had soiled itself. (Having said that, I could be doing the infant an injustice, as my first impression was that the smell was coming from the other side of me.) As if all that wasn’t traumatic enough, the head stewardess proceeded to riff on my obvious pain shortly after take-off by apologising profusely for the lack of an on-board drinks trolley due to… something or other.
Now I can’t even begin to imagine how many kilos one of those bastards weighs, but I’m sure it’s considerably more than three. What’s more, I can tell you for nothing that if we’d had one on our plane it wouldn’t have troubled the scales by the time we arrived in London.