Saturday, 21 February 2015

Hyne's Bar, Prussia Street

There is a deliberate mistake in my second 'Moss Reid' novel Black Marigolds. A pub scene set in Stoneybatter refers not once but three times to Hynes's pub on Prussia Street.

That's not its exact name, though many locals call it that. Even Come Here To Me, the excellent blog about Dublin's life and culture, slips up on it.

Look closely. It's "Hyne's Bar". One of the pub's regulars, Paddy Losty, was immortalised as a "pintman" in social historian Kevin C. Kearns's 1997 book Dublin Pub Life and Lore.


While you can find plenty of entries for "Hynes" in Irish phonebooks, I've yet to find anyone called "Hyne". So is the sign itself the mistake?