On a Friday night in Bridie’s, the older bar beside The George on Dublin’s South Great George’s Street, a man is telling me of the courage it took him just to walk through the door decades ago. “I kept passing by. That’s the truth. I think it was 1986 or 1987. It was a few years after the death of the boy.”
“The boy” he’s referring to was Declan Flynn, a 31-year-old gay man killed in Fairview Park in the early hours of September 10th, 1982. He was kicked and beaten to death by a gang of five teenagers who had carried out a series of homophobic attacks in the park that summer.
“I was a bit scared to come in, but I did on my third attempt. I walked around the block, came back, walked around again. That’s the truth.”
The George, now Ireland’s largest and best-known gay venue, was smaller then and Ireland was a different country. Homosexuality would not be decriminalised until 1993. A gay bar was not simply somewhere to come to have a drink; for many, it was a threshold between the life they lived outside and the life they could briefly live inside.
Inside today, The George breaks into several versions of itself. Bridie’s, the older side bar, feels closest to a Dublin local where older regulars sit in the afternoon and early evening, where someone can begin a story with a reference to Rice’s or Bartley Dunne’s and expect to be understood. Through the adjoining room, the building turns theatrical: stage lights, drag posters, a dancefloor and a DJ box raised above the crowd.
From there, DJ Karen Reddy, who has worked in the bar for more than 30 years, says she sees almost everything from her “crow’s nest”.
It’s a Friday night and Reddy is telling me the story of how Dublin’s now famous venue came to be.
Before The George became The George, it was simply a pub in need of attention. Cyril O’Brien, a Kerry businessman, drank there and kept urging the owner to do it up. Eventually, the owner suggested O’Brien buy it himself and in 1984 he did just that. Upstairs, he opened a gay disco called The Loft, a room former senator David Norris once described as looking like “the inside of a hairdresser’s brain”. A year later, O’Brien brought the venture downstairs, exuberant décor and all, and The George became one of Dublin’s first bars opened expressly for the gay community.
When Reddy first came to The George in 1989, the venue was divided: downstairs was straight, while the gay bar was upstairs and, in those years, men only. She was allowed in, she says, because she came with gay male friends; afterwards, when they went on to a club, she would have a hard time convincing friends she had really been inside The George.
The early George she remembers was small, camp and crowded.
“This would be packed at seven o’clock. The music was ABBA. There was a guy who worked behind the bar and he was an ABBA fanatic. He had all the imports from Japan and everything, so they would do ABBA nights here. It was camp as Christmas. It was a vibe. I’d be in the middle of it all going, ‘This is f**king deadly.’
“Before decriminalisation, you could still come here, but you didn’t come in the front door,” she adds. “Most people came in the side door because they didn’t want to be seen. People had the fear of being caught. In those days, names were printed in papers, and God forbid your name was printed. You had to leave the country. You shamed your family. You can’t negate how serious that was. If you were caught your name was printed. It was very underground.”
In Bridie’s, affectionately known by some regulars as “Jurassic Park”, one patron remembers hearing about the bar through a small ad at the back of a magazine.
“You went all the way upstairs to this attic room. The atmosphere was very different. Compared to now, it was much smaller but it had an edge because it was so outside the norm.”
The change since then, he says, is not subtle.
“Now everybody wants to come. You can’t have a decent dinner party unless you’ve got a couple of gays at it, preferably ex-prime ministers and marriage equality campaigners,” he jokes.
This weekend, The George is celebrating its 40th birthday and for this patron, the anniversary is inseparable from a wider change in Irish society.
“I think The George reflects 40 years of growth in the economy, and 40 years of social change in Ireland.”
Another regular says that although Dublin is more open now, the old underground queer scene had an energy he feels the city has lost.
“We had a lot more gay venues back then than we actually do now. It was all underground. And it was so much better. It was so much more exciting. The younger generations don’t know what they’re missing that way. They really don’t,” he says.
“But we could have been arrested and imprisoned. That was what it was, but we still went out.”
After decriminalisation, Reddy says, “a lot more people came out”.
“Everyone knew everyone. We were all in it together. We were all experiencing this massive thing: we weren’t criminals any more.”
If the first decade of The George was about finding the room, the next was about filling it. By the 1990s, for many people outside Dublin, The George had become not just a bar but the go-to gay venue in Ireland.
For Fergus Daly, originally from Arklow, Co Wicklow, it was the first gay place he knew how to find.
“I was 15 and I was very tall. Security thought I was older,” he says with a laugh. “It’s not their fault. I’d come up here on a school trip and my friend Mary’s sister worked in a hairdresser’s and said: ‘That’s The George. That’s where the gays go.’ So I knew where to go. It was a different time, and here you felt safe.”
Daly now finds himself watching a younger crowd move through the place he once approached with awe.
“When I came here first, I thought people here were older, and they were probably younger than I am now. And now I’m sitting here. We’ve seen a lot of places come and go, but The George will always be here, I think. I wish the kids now appreciated it more. Some of us have been here a long time.”
Darragh Flynn, general manager of The George, first came as a customer before starting work there shortly afterwards.
“When I started in 2009, it was such a unique bar. I had worked in the industry before for a while and The George just had its own vibe and its own atmosphere … seeing the happiness in people here was unique,” he says.
“The George is a space for a community in Dublin, and there aren’t many of those. We always felt it was pretty much like a community centre for people. It was like a home from home. And I really feel, when you are working here, that you are looking after someone’s home. We know hundreds of our regulars by name. I don’t think you get that strength in other nightclubs.””
The stage in the main bar also changed the bar’s relationship with the city throughout the years. While drag shows have helped make The George visible, and welcomed people who might otherwise have never visited a gay bar, it has also created careers. Drag queen Davina Devine first entered The George as a teenager. “It was my 18th birthday and I’d never seen a drag show in my life,” she says.
She has since become one of the venue’s best-known performers, hosting her “punch-drunk comedy” Thirsty Thursdays night, co-hosting the popular podcast Petty Little Things with Victoria Secret and appearing regularly on panel television shows.
Twenty years later, The George is central to her career and identity. “I never in a million years thought this could happen,” she says. “None of it could have happened without The George. It really has changed my life.”
For Devine, the venue is more than a workplace: “The George is more than a bar and it’s more than a club. It’s a community space … it’s always been a safe space across the board for everybody.
“I always think of The George like Coronation Street: you have your Rita, your Ken Barlow. It’s full of drama and although the different players change sometimes, the stage we love stays the same.”
For Devine, The George’s appeal now reaches beyond that of a typical gay bar. “Back in the day, being gay wasn’t as accepted. Now it’s such a safe space and, with the way clubbing has gone, it’s become the place to go,” she says. “It’s not just a gay bar, it’s simply a fabulous venue.”
For Devine, the anniversary is less about doing something new than recognising what has already been built. “Every day we get in that space is a celebration,” she says. “We’re continuing the fabulousness of the past and making sure it’s there for the next generation.”
Perhaps The George’s most public displays of fabulousness came in 2015, when Ireland voted for marriage equality and the inside of the bar was broadcast by Vincent Browne live across the country. For manager Flynn, it remains one of the bar’s defining memories.
“That was phenomenal,” he says. “Just the live reaction from people, the celebrations, the pride. The whole place just opened up. It was unique. You don’t get that in the rest of the industry.”
Reddy remembers the broadcast that night as “kind of weird, but in a good way”.
“The drag queens were on doing numbers, and Vincent Browne was down in the corner doing interviews. But he was having a great time. He was clapping and singing along. It was surreal. We were on live TV and when the results came in, the place went ballistic. The streets were ballistic. Everyone was just going nuts. I will never forget that day. That day was something special.”
While the bar that opened before decriminalisation had become one of the rooms through which the country watched itself change, for the staff of The George, equality and acceptance is not treated as a finished story.
“One man recently sent me a message,” Reddy says. He was living in the country and had been listening to Madonna. He felt excluded in his home town. He came to Dublin, walked into The George, and I played that exact Madonna song while he was here. He said he felt he had come home, because this was where he felt safe and accepted for who he was. That was lovely. I was bawling when I read it.
“You do see people come in here who then have to go home and live their country existence, and they’re not happy, because they’re hiding. They can’t be their true selves. When they walk through the door here, they can be who they want to be. They can be their true selves.”
And while the promise of The George has always been that people could leave fears and worries outside, some nights fear found its way in.
“We did have bomb scares a few times,” Reddy says. “The second one was more serious… [The guards] came in, kicked us all out and searched the place. They had dogs, sniffer dogs, everything.”
Once the doors reopened, Reddy says, The George did what it does best: it turned the speakers back on and made a night of it into the late hours.
In recent years, The George has become a place not only of first nights and meet-cutes but also anniversaries, engagements and weddings.
“We’ve had wedding receptions here,” Reddy says. “We’ve had staff get married, and just a few weeks ago we had an engagement on the stage with candles spelling out ‘marry me’. Nine times out of 10, the couple met here.
People can come out from a younger age and it’s more accepted
— Darragh Flynn
“There are so many memories over the years. We’ve had the musical acts like Coolio, countless fundraisers, marriage equality. They are just great memories, and they keep coming.”
Flynn has also witnessed a lot of change for the better over his 16 years working there.
“It has become more diverse. Back then, there were a lot of gay people coming here on their own. Sometimes people would go out with their friends and then come here afterwards. Now people come with their friends. People can come out from a younger age and it’s more accepted. It is more of a space for gay people and allies.”
From her DJ box, Reddy has her own view of the present state of clubbing in The George. She has the affectionate exasperation of someone who has watched several generations discover the dancefloor.
“Compared to the 1990s, the dancing has changed. Or there’s a lack of dancing now, because they’re all on their phones. That’s very annoying. Gen Z are useless. They don’t know how to have fun,” she says.
“I don’t know whether it’s Covid’s fault or something else, but something happened during Covid to this generation that is now coming out to clubs. They don’t know how to club like we used to.”
But Reddy knows a room only stays alive if it moves with its crowd. The George’s weekly programme now rotates between weekday drag shows, Friday’s Release party, where go-go dancers, face paint and confetti canons fill the dancefloor, and long-time favourites like Shirley Temple Bar’s Sunday bingo.
For younger customers, The George is not only a landmark but a working nightclub: a place for birthday groups, first dates and after-work crowds to mingle between the bar, the stage and the dancefloor. Later in the evening, DJ Thaal is due to play a guest set of Brazilian funk and international pop, one sign of how the sound of the room has changed with Dublin itself.
Reddy is a fan of the changing sound. “We have a multicultural society now. We play Spanish music. I’ve played Turkish music at times, because we’ve had Turkish staff and they’d give me something and I’d find a dance mix. You can’t just play the same thing. The songs are great. You have to keep up. If you don’t, you’re going to be left behind.”
Back in Bridie’s, the older patrons measure progress with a certain caution. While one 75-year-old Dubliner has seen the city change, he doesn’t exactly see it overflowing with queer spaces like other European cities are.
“There are only three gay bars in Dublin, for 1.2 million people,” he says. “I was in Torremolinos last week, and it’s a holiday town. There were 40 gay bars. There are 45 gay bars in Madrid. Here the choice is small. This is your choice.”
Still, he says, the change inside the bar is unmistakable. “I’ve seen a lot of change in the past 40 years. You can come in with your friends now, and you can hold hands and kiss. That wasn’t allowed years ago. There are a lot of stories, but not for print,” he says. “I just hope The George is here for another 40 years. And a few more like it.”
At 92, pensioner Bob Byrne brings another kind of history into Bridie’s: older than the bar, older than most of the songs coming from the dancefloor next door and old enough to remember a Dublin before any of this seemed possible.
He was born in a tenement house near Westland Row, into a family with very little money but, improbably, a piano. “My father had the bizarre idea that a home wasn’t a home without a piano,” he says. “We certainly didn’t have two pennies, but we had a piano anyway.” Music carried him from Dublin to London, where he spent 40 years as a working musician, before returning home in 1994. For his 90th birthday, The George staff put him on stage in front of a crowd young enough to be his grandchildren. He sang Delaney’s Donkey. “I was a performer. I was a musician all my life. It was a great night,” he says.
Is he impressed by the pop and techno beats reverberating from the young crowd in the main bar?
“The music next door? That’s a matter of taste. I don’t care about it. I grew up with Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra, but I still like the modern stuff. I don’t have a musical bias.”
For the bar’s anniversary this weekend, bar manager Flynn has been gathering stories from people who have passed through the venue and encouraging patrons to share them on social media.
“We are trying to connect with people who have memories of The George over the last 40 years and get their stories. We have been asking people for their favourite memories, and we’ve got some really good ones. We’re trying to gather all that information and put it together, because there are so many heartfelt stories. It would be nice to document them before they are forgotten,” he says.
“We are always trying to make it bigger. I don’t see it going anywhere any time soon. If you are here for 40 years, you are ingrained in society and in people’s hearts and minds. I just hope the spirit of The George stays alive.”
For 40 years, The George has stayed recognisable even as the players have changed. Some arrive for their first drag show, some come back after decades abroad, and some sit in Bridie’s remembering people and nights now gone. The room may be louder and brighter now but its essential promise has held steadfast: come in, be seen, and for a few hours at least, belong.
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