Green but not black and white with some real colour

May 27 2009 By Andy Walker

I HAVE a confession to make.

I stayed in Dublin for two nights and I didn’t have a pint of Guinness. That’s right, not a single drop of the black stuff passed my lips.

Not being a teetotaller, the decision to refuse Ireland’s favourite tipple brought a look of astonishment from my mate Ben. “You can’t come to Dublin and not have a pint of Guinness,” he said, shaking his head and licking off the white moustache.

Well, I figured, I didn’t like Guinness so why the hell should I drink it just because I was in Ireland?

I had been to Dublin before, gone on the tour of the Guinness Storehouse and appreciated it, but that is where my relationship with the drink ended. I wasn’t prepared to have Guinness forced down my neck, in the same way I didn’t want to be spoon-fed ‘Irishness’.

Irish-themed bars are ten-a-penny (should that be ha’penny?) nowadays so I wasn’t going to dance a jig, and chat about the craic just because I was in an Irish bar in Ireland.

If I ever discovered that my long-lost uncle’s cousin’s dad’s dog was from the Emerald Isle and felt the urge to celebrate my new-found Irish link, then I could head to Digbeth and wait until March 17.

A host of our Friday night musical pub crawl hit the nail on the head while 40-odd tourists sat around in the Ha’ Penny Bridge Inn waiting for him to play the next tune.

“There aren’t many real Irish bars in Dublin,” he announced. The man was right, the majority of traditional boozers in the Temple Bar district have been renovated to give them an Irish look. Bicycles are now hanging from ceilings and musical instruments have been nailed to walls that have been washed with green paint.

My aim was to let the real Dublin come to me; I didn’t want to gorge on the culture, I wanted to soak it up.

The musical pub crawl was an attempt to do just that. Two musicians led us around various drinking establishments whilst dishing out an education on the Gaelic language and the history of Irish music, with the occasional song thrown in.

Our trip had a musical theme and, earlier, we had jumped aboard the Rock’n’Roll Writers Tour. Andrew O’Toole was host on a genuine tour bus (as proven by the million miles on the clock) that had been, as the MTV generation put it, ‘pimped’.