My Day

Colm Quinlan - founder of Dublin Literary Pub Crawl

I’VE BEEN doing this for 23 years. I studied history at college and was working as an actor when I came up with the idea. It’s got everything going for it – pubs, poets and pints – so it was a no-brainer.

There are six of us giving the tours. I’ll do some myself but I’ll be there to meet and greet on all of them.

I live near Camden Street and my office is in Suffolk Street and I’m usually in around 10am. I’ll work from then until 4pm, answering phones and e-mails, organising corporate bookings and doing credit control (chasing cheques).

You could set your watch by me for lunch. I eat between 2pm and 2.30pm, when the students have gone back to Trinity and the cafes are quiet. At 4pm I’ll go home to help with dinner, the homework and listen to the kids, aged 10 and 12, practice their music.

Tours depart from The Duke on Duke Street at 7.30pm. I’ll go in 40 minutes early to get organised and sell tickets to people who haven’t pre-booked. We have a private room upstairs in which I’ll introduce the tour and explain about the quiz and the prizes afterwards, and then we all head downstairs to the pub to get to know one another and find out where everybody’s from.

The majority are from overseas and any Irish will have brought tourists with them because they’re too afraid to come on their own.

We start off around Duke Street talking about Joyce and Leopold Bloom, and then head to Trinity, where we talk about Oscar Wilde, Eavan Boland and Brendan Kennelly.

From there we head to O’Neill’s pub on Suffolk Street, a favourite of Northern poets such as Michael Longley. Then it’s on to St Andrew’s Church, now Dublin Tourism, which was the site on which the first Viking parliament was built, on a man-made hill so that they could keep an eye out for invaders coming up the river.

There are around 30 people on each tour. In summer it would be double that, so we’d divide them in two. The people who come on it are all readers fascinated by Ireland’s literary brand. We’ll pass by Johnson’s Court into Grafton Street and end up in Davy Byrnes. In all it takes around two-and-a-half hours. I’ll only have a drink towards the end. If I start too early I’ll forget names and dates. Once it’s over I’ll stay and chat for about 20 minutes and then toddle off home.

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