DUBLIN, IRELAND — The two men drink standing near the back of the long bar at Davy Byrnes, one of the many watering holes in this city that, in the words of writer Samuel Beckett, who once lived upstairs, have been known to house "broken glass and indiscretion."
In the back, because that's well away from the "whippets" and "blow-ins" who tend to wander in, armed with neither intellect nor wit, if one distinguishes between the two, settle on the first available stool and ask for a "Boodweiser" from the barman.
Standing, because as the long, merry nights wear on, each of the men must be on his toes, or miss the opportunity to point out a deficiency in the other's grasp of 13th century history, or drop a deftly delivered pun, or tell a magnificent lie.
"Some of the time I'm telling the truth. You have to figure out for yourself whether I'm having you on or not," says Roy McCutcheon, a native of Belfast who met Paul Winter here at the pub made famous by James Joyce -- now a civilized "gastropub" with very little broken glass -- one evening three years ago, and on a good many evenings since. "We're like-minded. We're very sharp, very quick, we've got a great repartee going on."
"He's full of it most of the time," Winter says. "And he's a fascist."
"I'm not a fascist. But you're a Trotskyite."
If there is a common denominator to these long, cantankerous evenings, it is Guinness, the beer so fundamental to Ireland that one has only to say, "Pour me a pint" to receive, in due course, a wide, ceremoniously poured glass of "the black stuff."
Bitter and muddy, thick with creamy foam, too meaty for the heat but a blessed lubricant for a foggy night and a tearful chorus of "Carrickfergus," Guinness is Ireland's best-selling beer. Sixtysomethings like McCutcheon and Winter, weaned on its thick roasted-barley essence as teenagers, wouldn't even consider drinking a wispy lager in its place.
But even Guinness, it seems, is not immune to the forces of open markets, suburban sprawl and Ireland's evolution from an impoverished backwater of emigrants to one of Europe's economic powerhouses, a country that imports cheap labor now from Eastern Europe.
Even as sales have boomed elsewhere, Guinness has seen its business decline in Ireland over most of the last seven years, a trend that eased only slightly last year with a growth rate of 3.5%.
The problem is, Irish traditions are something many Irish simply no longer have time for.
