The Village Pubs of Cork: ‘Raising prices can be tough... half of these customers are friends’

Taking the winding road west along the sea from Clonakilty, you come to a pier with fishing boats tied up, and there the village of Ring will appear.

Kitty Mac’s, a sea-facing pub, stands at the bend in the road. Its walls have seen Civil War raids, songs, politics, and plenty of pints.

Since 2014, Sean Doyle and his wife have kept the place alive. True publicans, they live upstairs with their two children. Yet, despite his dad and his uncle being in the pub trade, Sean never thought he’d become a publican.

“I never thought I’d do it,” Sean admits, sitting with his back to the fireplace. “But as soon as this pub came up for lease, I wanted it. My old man had a pub, my uncle too, so maybe it was in the blood. We haven’t looked back.”

Sean was born in Birmingham but is Irish through and through. Both sides of his family hailed from the Emerald Isle - Cork and Dublin. His grandparents moved back first, then Sean followed.

“I’ve been here twenty-odd years now,” he says. “We always used to come over to Red Strand, drink in Fisher’s, and when we moved full-time, family occasions were often in Kitty Mac’s. When the lease came up, it felt right.”

The pub, as the name suggests, was once run by a woman by the name Kitty Mac.

“She was a character,” Sean says. “She wouldn’t touch money. You’d put it on a slip of paper, she’d slide it into the till and hand you your change.

“She’d be saying the rosary kneeling at the window before opening. And she had all the bankers and politicians from Clon’ over playing tennis on the court across the road.”

Around the corner, a popular local character, a woman also named Kitty - not to be confused with Kitty Mac’s itself - who is in her eighties, still runs Barry’s pub, while the third village pub, Deasey’s, closed during covid and is mooted to soon be converted into housing.

That leaves Kitty Mac’s and Barry’s in Ring, each with their loyal customers.

“Sunday night just gone, both pubs had music,” said Sean. “That’s the way it should be.”

For him, the role of Kitty Mac’s is that of a community pub.

“When I met Fergal McCarthy, the man who leased it to me, I said I wanted to make it a community place. I think we’ve done that.

“We’ve brought back the Ring Festival, we do stuff for the local school, and we’ve the kids’ sports days. It all feeds back in.

“This year saw the biggest day I’ve ever had in the pub,” Sean says proudly. “The older fellas told me it was the most people they’d ever seen in Ring. The band we had on drew a crowd, but it was more than that, it felt like the village at its best.”

Like every publican, Sean knows that ups and downs are part and parcel of the pub trade.

“Every pub has had dodgy periods. We went through a rough patch pre-covid, no question. Funnily enough, as bad as it was, covid became a reset. Those laws, closing at eight or nine, they suited people. Folks came in earlier, the place would be hopping, and out the door on time. Since then, it’s got better and better.”

Earlier doors is a culture which seems to have become the norm, something every publican interviewed in this series has mentioned.

“When I started, people would drift in all day, and then the rush mightn’t start until half nine,” said Sean. “Now my busiest time is six to half-nine. After work, drinkers come in, they’re out early, because they’re working the next morning and no-one wants to get bagged. That’s the culture shift.”

Another change noticed across the trade is the younger crowds appreciating their local.

“There was a massive drop-off of younger people using pubs pre-covid,” Sean notes. “But it’s coming back. They’re coming in again, singing the old songs.

“On Sunday evening, I came back from refereeing a match and the place was full of young and old in a sing-song together. That’s what you want. Those nights had been getting scarce, but they’re coming back.”

Sean is a former music journalist, and music plays a big role in his vision for the pub’s future.

Regular Sunday sessions are now a fixture, and he plans one or two big events a year under marquees out the back. “That’s the next thing,” he says. “Keep the community side strong but build a few decent big nights. Clonakilty has shown what’s possible. Ring can do it too.”

Of course, running a pub isn’t all songs and suds, with long hours, family life squeezed, and ever rising costs.

“The hours can be tough with the kids,” Sean admits. “And prices. Some rises you can swallow, but some you just can’t. In a local pub, half your customers are friends. You can’t push it onto them or they won’t come back.

“You have to be competitive, because you live among these people.”

Tourism helps. Sean says: “Tourists are slower this year, but we still see the English crowd, Europeans, Americans. And there’s the fishing men. There’s a group from Liverpool, 20 of them, who come every September chasing bass. They make a point of coming here once a day. That’s 30 or 40 years of tradition.”

Tradition runs deep here. The building could possibly be 200 years old, Sean says, and, like many rural pubs of this vintage, its walls hold memories of the Civil War.

“It’s 101 years since a shooting here,” Sean explains. “It was Stephen’s Day in the 1920s and an IRA man was drinking inside when a raid happened. He shot out the light, escaped out the back, but a soldier from Tipperary was shot dead. There were bullet holes in the ceiling until a few years ago. I wanted to keep them, but when the place was done up, they were thrown away. A shame really.”

Stories like these, half-remembered, half-told, are what make Kitty Mac’s, and pubs like it, more than a business.

“We’ve made it a community pub,” Sean says. “That’s what matters. Everyone’s welcome, late thirties, forties, fifties, younger ones too. That’s what keeps it going.”