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8am – The Boars Head On Capel Street, Hugh Houric
an opened the doors to the Boars Head at 8am. It was a quiet morning. He was wrapping cutlery in paper napkins as his wife Anne walked in. “There’s some Christmas stuff in the post there,” he said to her, nodding to a stack of letters beside him on the counter. The Houricans were both originally from Cavan. But they met and married while working in hospitality in New York, he says. “We both lived in the Bronx, and both of us worked in Manhattan.” They bought the building back in 1993. Back then, the pub with an upstairs area was just a single storey, he said, pointing to a photograph of the original premises on the wall. “It was tiny. But in the morning, you’d have 60 people in here.” His first customer, a young man, stepped through the front door, asking for a Guinness. He took a table in the corner of the room, beneath a cracked mirror, which advertises Sylvester P. Doyle’s Special Whiskeys, featuring a boar’s head in its crest. “Before I came here, there was a staircase in here, which brought you down to a basement, and they found this behind the stairs while they were clearing the place up,” he said. Their initial idea had been to call the pub the New Penny. But in the end, this accidental find gave them a name that stuck. The Boar’s Head has more of the feel of a rural, family pub, he says. “And we came to be known as the posh early house, because we’d be strict on who we’d let in.” Whereas customers down in the Wind Jammer were traditionally dock workers, his tended to come from the nearby markets, he said. “They’d finish their shifts around six, and we’d provide food and drink. Not just drink. For when they were finished up in the mornings.” “We’d get nurses doing nights and guards coming off shifts, and a big thing with us was the casino staff, because the casinos would be closed at seven, eight o’clock in the morning.” “Seventy per cent of your business was morning business then,” he said. “Monday morning was the busiest day of the week,” Anne says. “You wouldn’t be able to get in the door. I’d put my head down and go straight up the stairs.” Although it used to open at 7am, the Boar’s Head has pushed its hours forward ever so slightly. It was the 2004 smoking ban that changed everything, he said. “I could feel this coming, and I was in favour of it, because I never smoked.” “You’re not going to be seen smoking outside a pub at seven o’clock in the morning, with people on the way to work,” he said. “That kinda changed it.” 9am – Slatterys A few doors away is Slattery’s, a three-storey early house located on the corner of Capel Street and Mary Street Little. At around 9am, the pub was filled with roughly ten silent punters, and two partial strangers who were arguing over a bet one of 18 them was trying to fill out on a slip of paper. “He’s useless,” one said. “Fuck off,” replied the other. Decorating the side of the staircase up to the first floor are the lyrics of “Molly Malone,” and hanging from a beam in the middle of the room, by the island bar counter, was a framed picture showing the various prices of Guinness over the years. Built in the 1850s, Slattery’s is one of the six remaining early houses in the inner city, which means it has a licence to serve alcohol before the national standard time of 10.30am, or 12.30pm on Sundays. Alongside Slattery’s, the Boar’s Head and the Wind Jammer, the other early houses are the Padraig Pearse on Pearse Street, the Galway Hooker inside Heuston Station and Molloy’s on Talbot Street. But like the Boar’s Head and the Padraig Pearse, which generally open at 8am, Slattery’s starts serving at 9am all days, except Monday, which is listed as 7am. The early house licences were first issued in 1927, says Sam McGrath, who runs the Dublin history blog Come Here To Me. “That gave the pubs this special allowance to open up early.” “It would’ve been done for fisherman, around the fish and fruit and veg market in Smithfield and dock workers,” he says. “So it would’ve been for them to grab a drink immediately after finishing their shifts.” The licence continued to be issued in the ensuing decades. But in 1962, the government made the decision not to allow any new pubs to extend their hours into the morning. “No new pubs have been given it since then,” McGrath says. McGrath estimates that at its peak, there were 44 early houses in operation across the city. In order to retain the licence after 1962, a pub needs to open early at least once a year, he says. “I believe there are some pubs in Dublin that don’t operate as an early house at all. But they will for one day in the year, just to keep that licence intact.” Former early houses, include the Cobblestone and Delaney’s on North King Street, The Metro on Parnell Street, and Madigan’s by Connolly Station. Most places don’t want to deal with the hassle of being an early house any longer, says Ken Mulvaney, the owner of Molloys. “They prefer to open late at night, as opposed early.” This spread: The Boar’s Head, with Anne in top photo and Hugh below Photo top right: The Windjammer