Historic Irish Pubs Kennys

Her family, tenants of the landlord, Denis Henry Kelly, had been running a public house in Ballygar since the 1790s, but the Feeney connection with the pub - which also sold groceries, farm provisions and delph - ended when Winifred, and her first child, died while she was in labour.

Patrick re-married, only for his second wife to be the victim of an early death. It wasn't until he married a third time that his son and heir, Thomas Kenny, was born in the 1860s.

Thomas was as much a republican as a publican. During the general elections of 1918 and 1927, de Valera enjoyed the Kenny's hospitality when he came to Ballygar.
Kenny's was also an IRA safe house during the War of Independence - according to Thomas's daughter, Winnie Kenny, who died aged 92. One night, a meeting was taking place in an upstairs room when three Crossley tenders full of Black and Tans arrived at the door. Sure that they had been betrayed, the revolutionaries upstairs prepared to shoot their way out. But the Tommies were only hunting late-night drink. While the Black and Tans drank the bar dry, little did they know that their enemies were hiding only a few feet away above.

Winnie also used to say that while some Black and Tans were no more than dangerous brutes, there were gentlemen among them. Sometimes the Tans would take over the bar and demand free drink, but on other occasions they would be on their best behaviour, with a senior officer paying all bills in full, plus a generous tip.

After national independence, Thomas served as a Fianna Fáil county councillor and Kenny's can still be described as "a Fianna Fáil pub".

Another tradition that survives from this era is the Kennys' custom of naming their firstborn sons after the child born to Patrick Kenny more than 140 years ago. The last two licensees have been named Thomas. The first Thomas Kenny, who took over the pub in 1945, lived only to 1966, dying at the age of 45 from lung cancer, unlike his father, who lived to see his 85th year.

The current licensee, Thomas Kenny, was a 16-year-old Inter Cert. student when his father died and had to leave his boarding school and his education to help his mother Nora run the pub. Of course, he had been involved in the business long before he was sent off to Dublin to be a scholar. During his national school days, when the pub was going through about a firkin of beer a week, it was his job to wash 128 half-pint bottles a week.

Guinness was available on draught before the arrival of "the iron lung" in 1968. But in the first half of the century, draught beer in Kenny's meant beer drawn from wooden kegs into an enamel jug and then poured into pint glasses. An enamel bowl was used with the jug, so that drips and spills could be captured for use when pouring the next pint of draught Guinness.

For a time, Watney's Red Barrel was available and the pub sold Bulmers Woodpecker Cider in flagon bottles. But Thomas says: "If you drank cider at any time between the 1950s and 1970s you would be regarded as a loose cannon. We also sold Barley Wine, which was called "poor man's whiskey" and by law we were not allowed to sell anyone more than three bottles of it.

The delph side of the business ended in the 1940s and the pub stopped being a general store in the 1950s. In 1958, the pub shared its premises with the family's butchering business and you could enjoy your pint beneath the carcasses of dead pigs and sheep. Health regulations only led to the butcher's being moved to new premises in 1982!

Thomas is extremely proud of his family's heritage - though he has broken with tradition by using Irish in naming his first son Tomás, who it is hoped will become the next licensee when five generations of Kennys will have held the licence. The pub has received numerous tourism awards, for, as Thomas says, "the public bar is a museum in itself". Inside, there are all kinds of paraphernalia including whiskey barrels from his grandfather's time, plus public notices and advertising. There are Guinness labels bearing the name "Nora Kenny" and a large reproduction of a label belonging to the first Thomas Kenny with the number 898181, the date of the first of August 1898 written backwards according to Guinness's numbering system.

Among a host of photos, there is, of course, one of de Valera. There are dozens of photos of County Galway all-Ireland teams, with pride of place given to the hurling champions of 1956. Naturally, both "Sam" and the McCarthy Cup have been visitors to Kenny's more than once. On one wall, Ballygar's most famous son, Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore, writer of the anthem "When Johnny Comes Marching Home", is commemorated. There is also a photo of the heavyweight boxing champion Floyd Patterson enjoying one of Kenny's black pints.

Today, during the summer months there is even an antique jaunting car outside, with a horse that never moves - and that is because it is made of fibre-glass!

Extracts from 'The Story of the Irish Pub' by Cian Molloy, supplied with permission of the Liffey Press. For more information on the book check the Liffey Press website.