After a steady decline, Why are so many Irish bars opening in Manchester right now?
It’s eerily quiet at Duffy’s Bar on Barlow Moor Road - but then again it is 11am on a Thursday morning. Most nights of the week, the place is packed out. Punters of all ages stand shoulder to shoulder, patiently waiting for their turn at the bar where they’ll most likely order the drink of the moment - a pint of Guinness.
When the family came to Chorlton 15 years ago there weren’t really any other Irish pubs or bars in the town. They knew they had a bit of a job on their hands. Like many pubs and bars across Greater Manchester - and the rest of the UK - Guinness has become one of their best selling drinks. According to Diageo, the British-based multinational that owns Guinness, one in every nine pints sold in Great Britain is the ‘black stuff’.
People are also becoming connoisseurs it appears - a bit like when pub-goers were obsessed with dishing out reviews on the latest craft ale. Many will have seen YouTubers like Jason Hackett, better known as ‘Primemutton’ giving his verdict on the best pints of Guinness in the UK and Ireland, and then there’s ‘S*** London Guinness’, which as you may have guessed, names and shames the venues serving sub par pints of the popular Emerald Isle export.
“A lot of it has been driven by Guinness because when pubs were shut during the pandemic you could buy a can or a bottle of beer, but in terms of Guinness it just wasn’t the same. We’ve always said here it could be 18-80 in terms of age, there’s not a specific demographic, but every group drinks Guinness. In terms of ‘Splitting the G’, purists would say ‘just drink the pint’, but with that whole thing comes a surge in sales.
As Paul Leavy, the landlord at The Station pub in Didsbury pointed out last year: “There aren't many places for them to go to... there used to be an Irish pub on every corner." From Fiddlers Green and the Chorlton Irish Club to Waxy O'Connors and The Shamrock, there are many loved and lost Irish venues in the city and further afield, which makes the resurgence even more interesting.
“There is no better way to spend an evening supping a Guinness, tapping your toes to Irish folk music, whilst lining your stomach with a bag of Tayto.” Someone who knows a lot about shifting pints of Guinness is Pádraig Brady, the landlord at beloved Irish bar, Mulligans. He's been at the helm for over a decade now, and in recent years has been so busy that they've been able to invest in the bar, unveiling a new upper floor and bar upstairs to cope with demand.
And it's clearly working. Mulligans is one of the city's most popular bars, and is regularly packed out on the evenings and weekends. Pádraig attributes his team's success to great atmosphere and customer service but also some other features. "Line cleaning is certainly a big part of it. We do ours every week without fail. When I came here, other pubs, not Irish, would see it as an expense, whereas for me personally, I see it as an investment into quality.
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