Glasgow is set to get another chain of Irish bars. As an Irishman, our Writer at Large is not impressed with yet more "cartoonisation" of his country and culture

There's sometimes a scene at the end of horror movies where the lead character seems to have escaped the demented fiend intent on killing them. A car stops to save them, or they run to an isolated house and beat on the door until it opens and they hide inside. They’re safe at last. The audience can breathe.

Invariably, though, the driver or the owner of the house is in cahoots with the fiend. Within seconds our lead is stabbed, sliced, shot or otherwise malkied to oblivion.

It’s the removal of hope which really twists the audience’s guts. The character they’re rooting for was so close to surviving, only for it all to be snatched away.

Now keep that reversal of fortune in mind, please, and let me tell you about the time I was meant to visit the only Scottish bar in St Petersburg. It was the mid-1990s and I was on a writing assignment to Russia. I thought I’d love it. I was mad about Russian culture – Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Pushkin, Mussorgsky, Tarkovsky.

It turned out to be the worst job I ever had, though. It wasn’t long after the fall of communism and the only growth industries that I could see were organised crime, homelessness and prostitution. Life was brutal and miserable. Society was chaotic and Darwinian. If you didn’t succeed – by using the bodies of the drowning as life rafts – you’d starve. Alcoholics were regularly found dead in the snow; children slept in the street. Bribery was endemic. I visited a women’s prison to write about conditions there and had to bribe the guards $100 to get out of the jail once I’d finished.

To cheer myself up, I’d go with some young like-minded Russians writers to what they called "old Russian bars" – meaning somewhere not yet under the sway of gangsters.

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With dispiriting regularity, the old Russian bars we visited had been bought over by criminals. Gone were the locals and the good times. In came strippers, drug-dealers and heavies with gun-shaped bulges under their jackets.

It really made my Russian friends unhappy. "This isn’t what Russia was like," they’d tell me, almost in tears. One said I should try a Scottish bar that had opened somewhere near the Neva river. I thought, what the hell, it’s not my type of thing, but anything is better than another night of gangsters, corpses in the snow, and being propositioned by prostitutes.

I found the Scottish joint, looked up at its strangely worded sign, "Bar Ecosse", and my heart warmed a little. I could get away from this bleak, barbaric city for a few hours. When I walked inside, though, it was like the last reel of those horror films where the lead character has their hopes destroyed.

This place called itself Scottish, but it was actually Irish. There were shamrocks everywhere, and leprechauns – dozens of feckin' leprechauns. It was all Guinness and the craic and The Dubliners singing Molly Malone.

I’d run for shelter and found myself in hell. I hate Irish bars, you see. They’re my kryptonite, my Waterloo, my nemesis. And the reason I hate Irish bars? I’m Irish. If I want to drink in an Irish bar, I’ll get on a plane and fly back to where I came from. I don’t want some Disneyfied Hibernian theme-park which turns my culture into an electric-green nightmare of stereotypes and condescension.

The Scottish bar in St Petersburg – which was actually an Irish bar – was run, bewilderingly, by a Frenchman. I drank bad Guinness, told him his gaff was merde and left, returning to the cold, desperate streets. Clinical depression beat death by paddywhackery.

Pity poor Scotland. We’re getting another chain of Irish bars, called – with audacious unoriginality – Katie O’Brien’s. The first opens in Glasgow. As proof of how authentically Irish the chain is, it turns out to be Scottish. I think that’s what the eye-roll was invented for.

The chain claims to be "your go-to for great craic". There is no craic in an Irish bar. They are anti-craic. I’ve had more craic getting chased by skinheads.

The only place worse than an Irish bar, is an English bar on the Costa del Sol. I’d sooner venture naked into the underworld to commune with the spirt of Vlad the Impaler than enter one of these flag-bedecked horrors. I don’t give a flying Finnegan's Wake if hating Irish bars and English bars makes me a snob or killjoy. I embrace my killjoy snobbery in this instance. My loathing would extend to Scottish bars and Welsh bars internationally, except you seldom see them. I’ve never even heard of a Welsh bar, in fact, proving yet again that our Cymru cousins are the most overlooked bunch on this archipelago of absurdity.

Ireland is easily meme-able (Image: Newsquest)

Evidently, it’s truly weird and dull to fly abroad and then spend your time in a boozer the same as the one up the road. But that’s the least of my triggers when it comes to Irish bars. To me, Irish bars reduce the country of Beckett and Yeats to day-glo shag-dens for stag nights and hen dos. It turns the spirit and history of an entire nation into a soft-play ball-pit for adult-sized weans.

Ireland, like Scotland, is easily meme-able. Ireland can be reduced to shamrocks and leprechauns; Scotland can be reduced to Nessie and haggis. Few other countries are turned into cartoons so blatantly and easily. The Irish bar is a shrine to cultural cartoonisation. It also reinforces the idea that Ireland is a nation of drunks. Look, we’ve spawned many Brendan Behans, but we do more than get pissed. Some Irish people are even boring. You should have met my Auntie Hazel. She was so tedious she put concrete in your craic.

There’s nothing better, though, than an Irish bar … in Ireland. Just as there’s nothing better than a Scottish bar in Scotland, and an English bar in England. Wales, ditto my friends.

Good luck to the day-drinkers and night-stalkers who end up patronising Katie O’Brien's. May your Guinness glug grand. But do yourself a favour. Once you tire of the tricoloured tribute act, get yourself to a proper pub. Glasgow is full of them.

Neil Mackay is The Herald’s Writer at Large. He’s a multi-award-winning investigative journalist, author of both fiction and non-fiction, and a filmmaker and broadcaster. He specialises in intelligence, security, extremism, crime, social affairs, cultural commentary, and foreign and domestic politics

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