The Unimportance of Being Mulligan

The dancers shyly took the floor when "First little Mickey Mulligan got up to show them how . . ." But Mulligan had hardly stepped out to the "toot of the flute and the twiddle of the fiddle," before the brazen "Widda Cafferty" shouldered him aside and was "lepping like a hare!" And that's the last we hear of Mulligan at that grand cotillion in the town of Ballymuck.

The name Mulligan is not writ large, if, indeed it is written at all, in Dublin's Writers Museum. However, it does have instant recognition elsewhere around town.

Almost everyone you meet, especially over a jar, seems to have heard of Biddy Mulligan, the Pride of the Coombe. And any street urchin can direct you to John Mulligan's Pub on Poolbeg Street, a block or so off the Liffey.

Biddy Mulligan was a drag creation of the comedian Jimmy O'Dea, who decades ago topped the variety bill at the Gaiety Theater and played the boozy old trout in endless Christmas pantomimes. In fact, O'Dea dreamed up the character when he saw an old biddie come stumbling out of a pub near the Moore Street market.

His "Biddy Mulligan" was a boisterous street vendor who reigned as "belle of the Charladies Ball." Her turf was the squalid tenements of "The Coombe," a slum area near Christ Church and St. Patrick's Cathedral that was gobbled up by urban renewers long before the Celtic Tiger reared internet millionaires.

Even its infamous pub, The Four Corners of Hell, was gentrified into a lounge bar with plush velvet banquettes, a color telly and an unpronounceable Irish name.

John Mulligan's Pub is still there in Poolbeg Street, little changed since Joyce used it as the setting for the denouement of Counterparts, his only pub-crawling tale in the Dubliners collection.

It was this literary connection that brought young Congressman Jack Kennedy to Mulligan's Guinness-stained mahogany bar and earned him a place of honor, along with the Pope and the Sacred Heart, in the portrait gallery along the paneled back wall. The future U.S. President had read the Joyce story in a literature course at Harvard.

My cartoonist friend Dik Browne, who created the comic strip Hagar the Horrible, also was drawn to John Mulligan's pub by his enthusiasm for Joyce's "dear, dirty Dublin."

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