Corner of Cross Street Upper and Quay Street, in the middle of Galway, and the easiest building in the city to give directions by. Royal blue to about waist height, butter yellow for the three floors above it, and the name laid across the front in gold, in Irish.
It has been open as a pub since 1894.
The house came first, and it is the better story
Before it was a bar, the building was the town house of Richard Martin, the Galway MP known as Humanity Dick.
Martin is worth knowing about. In 1822 he got an act through the House of Commons against the ill treatment of cattle, which is generally reckoned the first animal welfare legislation passed anywhere in the world, and it is still called Martin's Act. Two years later he was one of the founders of the society that became the RSPCA.
So the corner where people now stand outside with pints was, two hundred years ago, the Galway address of the man who made cruelty to an animal a criminal offence. Nothing on the building says so.
What it is now
A pub with small rooms rather than one big one, tied closely into the arts and music in Galway, which in a city with that many musicians is not a small claim. It is not a heritage exhibit and it does not behave like one.
The bit we left alone
There is a good deal written online about the age of the structure itself, some of it putting parts of the building a great deal earlier than 1894. We could not get any of that to a source we were willing to stand over, so the only date in our copy is the one the pub gives for itself.
Why we drew it
The colour, again, but mostly the proportion. Blue to the waist and yellow above it is a strange way to paint a building and it should not work. On a corner site, with the name in gold across the front in Irish, it does.
Six colours, flat, brush left showing.
Tigh Neachtáin, Galway, is in the Pub Series.
The Pub Series is a set of Irish pub fronts drawn one at a time. We go and look at the building, we read what we can find about it, and we say plainly which bits we could not verify.