Diaspora Season: Chapter 1 // Ireland’s unofficial embassies
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The Brussels Beer City Podcast: Diaspora Season is about Brussels’ immigrant communities and the places they love to drink. From ice cold Sagres with piglet sandwiches and pintjes in old bruine kroegen, to creamy pints, fried plantains, and more, the podcast will explore the drinking - and eating - cultures of just a small slice of Brussels’ diaspora communities, in the company of people who have come from all over the world to make their home here.
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Aodhán Connolly knows what makes for a good Irish pub. “I would call myself a bit of a wee connoisseur,” he says. “And for me, there's three things.” Connolly is the director of the Office of the Northern Ireland Executive in Brussels, a post he’s held since 2022, though work has brought him to Brussels for almost 20 years. “One is a good pint, right?” That’s why he suggested meeting at The Wild Geese, a corner pub in Brussels’ European quarter. “It's not your usual sort of Irish bar,” Connolly says, “but by God, do they do a good pint, [and] it's so hard on continental Europe to get a good pint of Guinness.”
Music is important, too; Connolly plays the bodhran and the mandolin, and his formative memories of Donegal village pubs have informed his views on the value of a good session. “The best session on this earth is in a wee pub in Bunbeg called Hiudai Beag,” he says, but in Brussels he’d be satisfied with one “that starts with two or three people playing a tune. And then 20 or 30 people [join in], and the music never stops.” The crumpled layers of old gig posters tacked onto the entrance of The Wild Geese attest to its musical bona fides. The third essential characteristic of a good Irish pub, Connolly says, is food. Fresh seafood chowder from the fishing villages of north-west Ireland being unavailable in Brussels, Connolly’s happy to settle for “a great fish and chips, and a good pint.”
The centrality of the pub to Irish social life - and by extension, the pint too - may be clichéd, but it’s not any less true. In fact, it might even be more true for Ireland’s emigrants. In Brussels, though it may not hold the global allure it once did, the Irish pub remains a fixture of the Irish emigrant experience. Everyone’s got their favourite pub, and their own pub stories. Including the Irish ambassador.
“...but by God, do they do a good pint, [and] it’s so hard on continental Europe to get a good pint of Guinness”
“A lesser known fact about the Irish ambassador to Belgium [is] I served pints in the Cú Chulainn Lounge in Patrickswell,” says Kevin Conmy, who’s held the post since early 2022. Conmy grew up in Chicago but moved back with his Irish parents to Patrickswell in Limerick when he was 10. As a teenager, Conmy got a summer job in the village pulling pints of Guinness for wary old-timers. “I had no idea what I was doing,” he says. “You knew you'd made the grade when they'd no longer avoided you when they wanted a Guinness.”
At several decades distance, Ambassador Conmy can still conjure up old memories of buying Curly Wurlys for a couple of pence from the little shop counter in Lena Chawke’s bar in nearby Adare, and it’s clear they left their mark on an impressionable young Irish-American. Like Connolly - who worked behind the bar of his local GAA clubhouse - the value of the pub as an intergenerational community focal point has stuck with Conmy through his diplomatic postings in the US, UK, and now in Brussels.
Something else has stuck with him too, a secret - or not so secret, given Irish people hardly ever stop going on about it - ingredient Irish pubs have that has helped propel them to international ubiquity. “You tend to still get that sense of [an] Irish welcome” in Irish pubs at home and abroad, Conmy says. “We can be very self-congratulatory about this, but it is actually true. Irish people have a knack of being able to make people feel relaxed and engaged.” It’s a knack that has kept Brussels in Irish pubs since the first one opened nearly 35 years ago.
Shillelagh-waving crazy men
When Donegal man Brian O’Donnell - who a Flemish newspaper described as “a typical ur-Irishman” - opened the James Joyce near the European Commission’s offices in May 1989, he joined a trend started in Liverpool five years previously. English writers Jessica Boak and Ray Bailey, in their book 20th Century Pub, date the “first custom-built 100-per-cent-genuine fake Irish pub” in England to the opening of Flanagan’s Apple in 1984. Irish pubs began opening in Paris and Berlin throughout the late 1980s, and soon after opening in Brussels, the Joyce had company; in early 1990 Kitty O’Shea’s launched in the shadow of the Commission’s HQ, and throughout the 1990s more followed.
“Irish pubs have served as unofficial embassies, employment offices, a place to see the match, to link into the other Irish people, [and] the local community”
For over a century, Brussels had been a stronghold of English beer, but soon ads for Guinness and Kilkenny were replacing Whitbread Pale Ale and Watney’s Red Barrel on pub facades across town. In the EU quarter pubs like the Queen Victoria - where British diplomats celebrated the UK’s entry into the EEC in January 1973 - were supplanted by the Joyce, Kitty O’Shea’s, the Old Oak, and O’Farrells on Place du Luxembourg. A building on the Beursplein that had once displayed a two storey-tall Bovril sign became a branch of the O’Reilly’s pub chain. And on Place Flagey, a bar that once advertised “bières anglaises” was rebranded as De Valera’s, after Ireland’s most consequential politician.
Aodhán Connolly, then a young student, experienced this Irish pub fever first-hand. “It was just around the time of the Good Friday agreement,” he says. “U2 were at the top of the charts. And everywhere, but everywhere, in England and Scotland, in Europe, they had an Irish bar.” As Boak and Bailey wrote in 20th Century Pub, for non-Irish drinkers they offered familiarity and foreignness, somewhere comfortable and “pub-like” but different from their vernacular café culture.
This was no different in Brussels than in Birmingham or Berlin. “There's something about this export which just really works in loads of settings internationally,” says journalist Naomi O’Leary, co-host of The Irish Passport podcast and The Irish Times newspaper’s Brussels correspondent. O’Leary, who caught the pub bug from her publican father, has a good handle on the success of the Irish pub abroad having made an excellent St Patrick’s Day podcast special in 2018 on the topic. “It's fascinating to me how far this goes, and how many people around the world want to positively engage with it,” she says. The Irish pub is a concept malleable enough to accommodate the needs of the locals who will inevitably make up the majority of its drinkers, and in their most successful manifestation “have their own reality separate from their link to Ireland,” O’Leary says.
Kitty O’Shea’s is a prime example. “[It’s] the most famous Irish pub in media circles,” she says, with the EU press corps prone to decamping there during late-night negotiations between EU leaders in the European Council building down the street. “It would be a kind of ritual that…everybody retires to Kitty's.” The pub’s proximity to power - crane your neck and you can see through the windows the Berlaymont building’s 13th floor, where EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has her office - means it’s not just journalists who have availed of a pint at Kitty’s. Bob Geldof once dragged Von der Leyen’s predecessor José Manuel Barroso there for a drink, and when he was a Brussels correspondent Boris Johnson was known to sneak in for a beer in between filing his tendentious dispatches.
“Irish boys miss two things: they miss their mammy and they miss the pub”
This international crowd has always been a lucrative pool from which Brussels’ Irish pubs could draw customers, alongside Belgians lured by their reputation for ‘the craic’ (sorry), and Irish people in search of a good pint and a televised match at the weekend. The pubs bend to the needs of their customers, like the British drinkers looking for somewhere to host Brexit debates, wakes, and parties. Or De Valera’s at Place Flagey, where the local supporters club of an Italian football had long sequestered a corner as their ersatz clubhouse to watch Sunday afternoon Serie A matches.
But the Irish pub abroad will always have its closest connection to the local Irish diaspora. “Irish pubs have served as unofficial embassies, employment offices, a place to see the match, to link into the other Irish people, [and] the local community,” Naomi O’Leary says. The sight of a Guinness sign above the door of a pub on an unfamiliar street in a strange city can have unexpected effects on even the least nationalist of Irish people. “It doesn't matter where you go, there's an animal attraction or magnetism” to it, Aodhán Connolly says. “You will find people…who you expect to be not Irish at all when they go away and suddenly become, you know, shillelagh-waving crazy men.”
The shillelagh-waving crazy men of Brussels are different to their compatriots in London and other cities with long-established Irish communities. “Irish emigration to Belgium has been very much since 1973, when we joined the EEC,” Ambassador Conmy says. “And it's a different type of immigration. It's very much professional people coming to do [specific] jobs…and so it doesn't have the same mix of Irish citizens.” There are Irish people who’ve settled into Brussels for the long-term, but a significant number are only ever going to be in the city for a couple of years - on a time-limited diplomatic posting, or undertaking early-career internships before moving back to Dublin. This constant churn means there isn’t always the time to make a deep connection with the place, which serves to accentuate the role of the Irish pub as a rallying point for the community.
“There was a period…where the Irish bar kind of took over the world. And then there was a counter revolution saying this was not the kind of culture that Ireland wants to be known for,”
“In the diplomatic life, I could be out every night of the week [drinking] nice wine and eat canapés and all that sort of thing. But there's a difference if you actually want to go out and enjoy yourself,” Connolly says. That’s what the pub is for. “It kind of provides a continuity, especially in places like this where people are in four year terms [and then gone].”
Brussels’ Irish pubs are the place to watch the rugby or the GAA, somewhere you’ve a good chance of finding a fellow Irish speaker, or a venue to trade the suitcase full of potato bread you’ve smuggled into Brussels. And, as Ambassador Conmy said, it’s a place where likely as not you’re going to get a welcome that reminds you of home.
Irish smiles > Belgian service
This reputation for a warm welcome has helped keep Neil Sullivan in business. After a long career in the pub trade spanning 30 years and stints in America, The Netherlands, and Germany, Sullivan took over The Wild Geese a decade ago. More than in any of the other countries he’s worked in, he says, the Irish welcome is uniquely suited to lending the Irish pub a competitive advantage in Brussels. “Because the typical Belgian service can be a little bit distant, or to some people can come across as unfriendly, it's a great bonus for us,” Sullivan says. “People are looking for the relaxedness that comes with an Irish pub.”
It’s a competitive edge that’s become increasingly important for Brussels’ Irish bars, as the city’s hospitality sector has experienced significant disruption in recent years, drinkers’ expectations of their pubs are changing, and the fever for Irish pubs that gripped Europe appears to have broken.
While “we've come to love and appreciate the role of the Irish pub in the Irish diaspora, I think also that high point has passed,” Ambassador Conmy says. At its peak in the early 2000s there were, by some estimates, 40 Irish pubs in Brussels. That number has at least halved in the interim 20 years. The Old Oak is now a wellness centre. Macsweeney’s near Avenue Louise is an Argentinian steakhouse. O’Farrell’s opposite the European Parliament has been an Exki for a decade. De Valera’s closed for several years then reopened, and its stablemate the Michael Collins was converted into a Brussels Beer Project bar - albeit one that serves a specially-brewed nitro stout as a mark of respect to its predecessor.
This isn’t a trend limited to Brussels, but there are particularities to Belgium that make it a difficult place to run a hospitality business. “Belgium is extremely difficult, the most difficult [place] I've ever encountered. Labour costs are extremely high,” Sullivan says. “It's a great place to be employed…[but it’s] more difficult to make things happen. The idea of making a lot of money with an Irish pub in Belgium is ...no way. It's not happening…The [profit] margin is very, very small.”
The global financial crisis cut a scythe through expense account-fuelled Thursday night parties (before the traditional Friday afternoon exodus from the EU quarter). The Covid-19 pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis more recently have not made things easier. Sullivan has seen his energy prices rise exponentially and his suppliers hike their prices.
The introduction of smoking bans - which arrived in Belgium in 2007 - and other social changes forced a fundamental rethink, Sullivan says, of the Irish pub concept. Where before people might have been happy going “into an old dingy pub where they might be showing the racing and everyone is smoking and women might not be really accepted, that has all changed dramatically,” he says. “People were looking for somewhere where they could go and relax [and] they still wanted the Irish welcome, a friendliness.”
Food was becoming more important too, and so when he took over The Wild Geese he made sure the pub’s offering was substantial. “Most places [back then] didn't serve any food at all,” Sullivan says. “I decided I will turn this place into more like a pub the way most of the pubs are in Ireland these days, like a kind of a gastropub.”
Clean lines, good food, and live music have helped Sullivan and The Wild Geese through the recent turbulence. And the constant churn of people in Brussels’ EU bubble means that even if the current population tires of the city’s current Irish pubs, there’ll be another cohort of new arrivals along shortly. It also helps that in recent years the attitude of some Irish people to one of their famous exports have mellowed. “There was a period…where the Irish bar kind of took over the world. And then there was a counter revolution saying this was not the kind of culture that Ireland wants to be known for,” Ambassador Conmy says. “But I think that's levelled out now. And I think what we see is that they are significant, important cultural spaces and businesses.”
While there are still people who complain about their cheesiness and their fakeness, Naomi O’Leary takes a more sympathetic approach to what Boak and Bailey called the authentically inauthentic Irish pub experience. “I feel there's a lot of sort of policing of the authenticity of Irish pubs that goes on among Irish people…[and] I see it as part of a broader tendency to police Irishness,” she says. “Who has the right to judge the Irishness of anybody else? There's a multiplicity of different Irish identities and they exist in different places, different countries and cultures, and they evolve over time.” Just like the Irish pub abroad.
The past couple of years have been hard for Brussels’ bars, and the city’s Irish pubs have not escaped unscathed. While there has been a culling of their numbers, Neil Sullivan remains bullish on their future prospects. “It's been an interesting few years,” he says. “Will there be a place for it in Belgium? Always. Unless something dramatically changes with Belgian service. But I don't see that really happening.” Even now, there’s a new Irish pub under construction in central Brussels which claims it will be the “biggest and the best Irish pub in Brussels with true [sic] atmosphere.”
It looks then as if Brussels’ Irish pubs aren’t going anywhere. There will always be people looking for somewhere to watch the Six Nations in the spring, or musicians looking for a session to join, or gaeilgeoirs in search of other Irish speakers. There will always be locals and international residents keen to seek out a bit of that famed welcome. And if all else fails, there will always be a new batch of Irish people arriving into Brussels every few months looking for a familiar waypoint in a hostile city.
Because, as Aodhán Connolly says while a barman brings two more creamy pints out on a tray: “Irish boys miss two things: they miss their mammy and they miss the pub.”
If they can’t bring their mammies with them, then at least Brussels has them sorted for pubs.
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