Dr. Perry Share

And they partnered with the McNally Design Company.

And I think it's about 2,000 pubs they subsequently created.

And Tracy talks about the work that went into designing those pubs.

It wasn't just a sort of cheap and nasty imitation of a pub.

They researched pubs all over Ireland, which was probably a nice job.

And they designed Victorian pubs, country pubs, and so on.

And they were literally packed into 40-foot containers, shipped off to...

Azerbaijan or Paris or Boston or wherever, unpacked and put into a building as an Irish pub.

It would, it would.

And there's a great website called Publican Enemy where a guy from Kerry is trying to visit every Irish pub in the world.

It's a big challenge, I think.

There's probably about 7,000 of them.

Obviously, it's hard to count them because how would you define them?

There's an awful lot of them, yeah.

And some cities have huge numbers, like Madrid and Bucharest have large numbers of Irish pubs.

Yeah, and that comes back to that argument I was talking about, you know, the role of the pub versus the role of alcohol in Irish society.

And that's, historian Dermot Ferreter has traced that for, you know, way back in, you know, for the foundation of the state.

There was discussions about pubs and about Ireland being over-pubbed and, you know, and not wanting to have that reputation of Ireland as a drinking country.

So there is a lot of tension in that argument.

It is.