I Have a Love — The Resurrection of Beer, Football and Community Under Dublin Floodlights
On 15 July 2009, Stephen Clinch landed in Salzburg, tired and confused, after jetting from Dublin to Sioux Falls, Minneapolis, back to Dublin, and finally, to Munich. He’d been buying equipment for his new brewery Trouble Brewing, and he’d hightailed it back to Europe because his beloved Bohemian F.C (‘Bohs’) were playing Red Bull Salzburg in a blockbuster Champions League qualifier.
“There’s no greater joy than a European football trip with a load of lunatics,” Stephen tells me, a joy heightened that day when Bohs took an unlikely 1-1 draw. Stephen was there in Dalymount Park (‘Dalyer’) the following week, as Bohs lost at home to a late Salzburg winner. But winning wasn’t why he supported Bohs his whole life. He’s there for the camaraderie, for the community spirit in the stands, and, to be honest, “for the misery.”
Stephen’s commingling of his two great passions is not exceptional in Dublin, a city that has both shaped and been shaped by these historically working class pastimes. Both have struggled for decades to escape the shadow of bigger, more powerful rivals, brought to their knees by the forces of globalisation, only to flip the script in recent years to stage stunning—often interconnected—revivals.
Stephen Clinch wouldn’t have known it on that depressing July evening in Dalyer, just a week after Saltzburg’s glory, but the seeds of these twin recoveries were already sown. He was blissfully unaware that successful relationships built up between a new generation of Dublin breweries and the city’s historic football clubs would become potential victims of that very success. But there was a lot of misery for Stephen to get through—with Bohs and with Trouble—before he’d have to worry about that.
Friday 18th April, 2025. Bohemians vs. Cork City, Dalymount Park.
Pre-match pints at Doyle’s and The Hut (Guinness, three,) one in the Members Bar (Ambush.) Under the Jodi Stand roof, hiding from rain. “Reynolds out!” Johnny Logan on the tannoy. Pyro smoke from the Ultras’ corner. “Moo-uve” a man pleads with the Bohs players. Speakers playing Spandau Ballet. Rowdy youngsters in the Mono Bar. A pitchside advert for Iggy Pop. Last minute winner. Dalyer erupts. The Stadium emcee queues up the Grandstand theme. “We love you Reynolds!” Post-match pint at The Bohemian (Guinness, one.)
It was a teenage school friend who got Stephen Clinch into beer, drinking bottles of English Ale his father would bring back to Dublin after trips across the Irish Sea. It was this same friend who got him into homebrewing. They were regular patrons of The Porterhouse brewpub in Temple Bar, searching for interesting, often foreign beers to drink and take inspiration from.
Out of this hobby emerged Trouble Brewing, geographically in Kildare but spiritually a Dublin brewery. Through it they sought to yolk the essence of these newly-fashionable IPAs, imperial stouts and American pales to an Irish drinking format.
“I’m from a working class background, I’m a pint man,” Stephen says, and Trouble’s beers were intended to be drunk as such.
Growing up in Cabra in Dublin 7, within sight of Dalymount’s floodlights in next-door Phibsborough, he caught the Bohemians bug early. Dublin is the capital of Irish football, with working class neighbourhoods like his becoming bulk suppliers of national team footballers.
Ramshackle Dalyer was its epicentre, hosting internationals, Bohemians matches, and even music concerts. Van Basten, Bob Marely, Liam ‘Chippy’ Brady, Phil Lynnott, Zidane, Meatloaf—they all togged out in Phibsborough; Pélé’s 1972 visit is memorialised with a dayglo mural by the stadium’s entrance.
Stephen has fuzzy memories of being lifted over Dalyer’s turnstiles by his father in the 1980s, but it’s Bohs’ 1992 FAI Cup win against Cork that sticks out as a pivotal childhood memory. The sponsor on Bohs’ jerseys that day was English brewery Bass, which was not unusual in a time when Tennent’s (Shamrock Rovers), Guinness (Cork), Beamish (Sligo Rovers), and later even Budweiser (UCD) sponsored League of Ireland teams.
“You only have to scratch the surface [of Phibsborough] to find a footballing connection,” says Gerry Farrell, Bohs’ historian, and another club member whose head was turned by their 1992 cup win.
There’s the homonymous Bohemian pub on the corner of the Phibsborough Road, which used images of stout Edwardian footballers in its early advertising. Across the street is The Hut (technically Mohan’s,) named after a long-demolished pavilion-cum-changing room. Gerry says players in the 1960s—his father was one of them—would sometimes race to the pub after training to fit in as many pints as they could before it closed for the “Holy Hour” at 2:30pm and they had to go home.
Those were the League’s glory years, when clubs could still pull in 20,000 people through the turnstiles—and Dalyer 40,000 for Irish matches. But the arrival of televised football and the growing financial and cultural hegemony of English football ate into the League’s popularity. Bohs experienced success in the 1990s and 2000s but it was losing fans and money. On the final day of the 2011 season fans unfurled a banner saying, “This is not the end” with the club nearly €7 million in debt and at risk of collapse. The club had, Gerry says, chased unsustainable success and lost sight of the community-focused ethos on which it was founded.
It was a lot of misery for Stephen to take, but it was a welcome distraction from the challenges of setting up a new brewery. Dublin publicans, he was discovering, were unfamiliar with the concept of local, independent microbreweries. “In 2010, if you wanted something different, you went to The Porterhouse or you went to the Bull and Castle,” Stephen says. “And that was it.”
Pale ales and IPAs were alien to the city’s bar owners, and those who wanted to stock Stephen’s beers might have had their hands tied by pre-existing contractual relationships. Soul-destroying days fruitlessly knocking on pub doors around town and coming home without a sale was, Stephen says, “absolutely mentally demoralising.”
Illustrations by David Squires
But there were days when he’d pick up a client or two and come home absolutely buzzing. Within a few years, these days became a little more frequent. The bar committee at Bohs had also spotted the potential of this “new beer” to lure people back to Dalymount, and they too began to put local beer onto the taps of the bars under Dalyer’s Jodi Stand (though not yet Trouble.)
Other breweries, and other football clubs, were taking notes. Across the River Liffey, Rascals Brewery was settling into its new home in Inchicore, almost in the shadow of St. James’ Gate, and its new marketing manager knew exactly how to ingratiate itself with the locals.
Friday 9th May, 2025. Shelbourne vs. St Patrick’s Athletic, Tolka Park.
Jack Doyle, the ‘Gorgeous Gael’ boxed here before 22,000 fans. Cold pints (two) at the Cat and Cage. Jostling with red home jerseys and the azure of the aways. The Riverside Stand is all seating but everyone’s standing. Jerseys on the ceiling and empty cans on the walls of The Reds bar. Half-time curry chips. Mason Melia, Ireland’s million euro striker. Another late goal. Tolka goes mad. Happy Shels fans on the Frank Flood Bridge.
Joe Donnelly remembers that, just before he started at Rascals in late-2018, he heard an executive at English brewery Magic Rock at a conference say the best decision they ever made was partnering with Huddersfield Town, their local club. Rascals, founded in suburban Rathcoole in 2014, had no organic connection to Inchicore; the owners had chosen it because of the cheap real estate. But it just so happened that the industrial unit they were about to occupy was only a couple of kilometres downstream on the Camac river from Richmond Park, home of St. Patrick’s Athletic.
St. Patrick’s Athletic (‘St. Pat’s’) was founded in McDowells Pub in 1929 by workers from the nearby railway works, and grew to become an integral part of Inchicore’s working class self-image. Legendary Irish journalist Con Houlihan described it as: “a people’s club,” and its fans “the salt of the asphalt and the tarmac and the concrete.”
Dermot Looney is one such fan, a Friday night pre-match Rascals regular who fell in love with the club’s raucous atmosphere as a teenager during the club's 1990s heyday, whose father played (briefly) for them, and who is now a historian of the club. “Inchicore has been a community in industrial decline for decades,” he says of the club’s importance to the area. “The community here didn't have a lot to cheer about. But they always had St. Pat’s.”
““The salt of the asphalt and the tarmac and the concrete.” ”
It was St. Pat’s’ deep connection with Inchicore that Joe sought to tap into, and in the years since 2018, Rascals has been a sponsor of, among other things, the man of the match award, the team sheet, and individual players. They’ve brewed limited edition St. Pat’s-themed beers, and this year the brewery’s logo will adorn St. Pats’ Down Syndrome futsal team. Joe’s wasn’t a blind gamble; he’d spotted the same trends as others, and others too. Stephen Clinch’s doom-and-gloom early days with Trouble Brewing were gone, subverted by a new generation of Dublin publican.
Stephen cites L. Mulligan Grocer as a forerunner of the kind of pub that put independent, locally-brewed beer at the centre of its offering, and which was followed by similar pubs that treated local beer with respect (The Bernard Shaw, The Back Page, P. Mac’s) and others for which good beer was the point (Galway Bay Brewery’s Against the Grain and Black Sheep bars, UnderDog, and 57 The Headline.)
A new cadre of Dublin breweries and contract brands were launching too—Lineman, Third Barrel, DOT, Whiplash—which Stephen says lent their mission a shared credibility, a strength in numbers, in the face of sceptical publicans. After years of nagging the club’s bar committee, he even managed to convince Bohs to accept a deal involving the brewery taking some advertising space around the pitch in return for serving Trouble beer.
When Rascals opened, St. Pat’s were averaging around 1,500 fans a game (in a 5,500-capacity stadium.) Within two years that number had increased by more than 25%, and clubs elsewhere in the city were experiencing a similar influx. Pubs around Dalymount that might have turned fans away for being too rowdy in the past, Farrell says, were now happy to buy pitchside advertising. Once derided as Irish football’s “difficult child,” the League of Ireland was becoming cool, and Friday night at Rascals increasingly resembled an informal St. Pat’s clubhouse.
That fans preferred a Sidekick IPA or a Happy Days Pale ale came as no surprise to Joe, because he’d noticed something about the brewery’s regulars and its local football fans. “The Venn diagram of [them] is almost a circle,” Joe says, in that they both share an “intense devotion, and a stubborn, almost martyrdom to the cause of the local brewery and the local football team.”
And he’s been happy to open up Rascals’ taproom as a refuge for the likes of Dermot Looney and his friends to mull over form (or the lack of it) before pocketing a few cans to sneak past the stewards and heading for the Camac Terrace.
Something was happening, and not just in Inchicore, a cultural phenomenon that appeared to have emerged fully-formed from nowhere. But really it was, as Gerry Farrell says, “The result of 10 years of hard work to be an overnight success.”
Friday 23rd May, 2025. St. Patrick’s Athletic vs. Waterford, Richmond Park.
Pizza and a pint of Rascals’ Yankee at the taproom. A tired Umbro kit, terracotta red, white NISSAN logo peeling. A pit-stop at The Saint, Richmond peaking out behind redbrick houses. A programme and a security pat-down. The Camac smells of wet grass and strawberry vape. A fan rings a cowbell. 80 minutes, Waterford goal. Richmond winded. “No wonder your wife left you, ye cunt!” A trodden-on Rascals can, abandoned by the terrace barriers.
As far as Richie Hamilton was concerned, his local barber in Skerries didn’t know he existed. The hirsute head brewer at Hope Beer in nearby Kilbarrack, North County Dublin doesn’t have much use for a barber—he keeps his locks long and curly. Nevertheless, one day, here came the barber running towards him on the street, shouting “I know where you work!”
Questions followed: Did you know I’m a huge Shelbourne fan? You brew our beer, don’t you? Could you get me a can? The brewery had just released 1895, Shelbourne’s new in-house pale ale, and evidently word had gotten around hardcore fans. But no, he couldn’t get him one; it was only available at Shels’ Tolka Park stadium in Drumcondra.
Even an empty can would be enough, the barber pleaded. Richie came back a couple of days later with a half-filled can to find it was for a Shelbourne-themed shrine the barber maintained in his shop. “It was like someone had just given him the holy grail,” Richie says. His conclusion? “Shels fans are mental.”
““Shels fans are mental.””
More than most, Shelbourne’s recent history has been topsy-turvy. Serial league winners in the early-2000s, financial collapse during the Celtic Tiger in 2006 banished them to years of lower-league football, joined by just a few hundred hardcore supporters.
Hope Beer entered the scene just as Shelbourne returned to the top division, and a month after they made the blockbuster appointment of Irish international legend Damian Duff as its manager in November 2021. The brewery has slipstreamed in the club’s success ever since, as matchday attendances increased eight-fold and the team even won their first title in almost two decades.
“We’d like to think we had a small part to play in that,” Hope’s co-founder Des McSwiggan says, with a wink.
Football fans and beer drinkers were converging for different reasons—a post-lockdown-induced mania for live football, and a greater appreciation for the value of “local”—but the underlying impulse was the same. Hope, Trouble, and Rascals; Bohs, Pats, and Shels—they were all offering something authentic, an antidote to corporate homogeneity.
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In the 2010s, Dubliners were bored. They’d seen the world, broadened their horizons and their palates, and Dublin was stale in comparison. Bars taps were oversaturated with uninspired identikit beers from multinational breweries, and choice was an alien concept. Televised football was boring too, because there was just too much of it to absorb.
“Too much shit in the pigpen,” says Donnchadh Mac Aogáin, a former player for Shels’ amateur team. “[And] nothing stands out when it’s so ubiquitous.”
In the margins of these monocultures, organisations offering a more distinctive alternative were incubating new, vibrant communities. The youthful exuberance and optimistic energy Des encountered at beer festivals in the early 2010s, where you could experience new, adventurous beers and hang out with the people who made them, convinced him and Hope’s co-founders to open the brewery.
Dublin’s stadiums exude a ramshackle kind of charisma. Tifos and fireworks displays are common and things happen in Tolka Park, Barry says, that would get you banned from an English stadium.
“It's theatre versus the cinema,” Donnchadh says, of the league’s raucous appeal. “Do you want to watch Star Wars Episode 24 in the cinema every weekend, or a gritty, one-man show that you're fucking being drawn into?”
These features may have seduced Dubliners, but what got them hooked was the sense of community spirit they discovered. This kept Donnchadh and his fellow die-hards in Tolka Park’s Riverside Stand coming back even in Shelbourne’s worst moments. A shared commitment to a cause greater than their own, though Donnchadh admits some clubs have been better at this than others.
Under the “Bohs In The Community” banner, Bohemian F.C. have worked on prisoner rehabilitation programmes with nearby Mountjoy prison, supported refugee organisations and brought marginalised groups to Dalymount for matches, and became the first professional football club to take part in Dublin Pride.
Collaborating with local businesses like Trouble is just one more aspect of this ”Support those who support Bohs” ethos. People care, Gerry Farrell says, if their club is owned by an American venture capitalist or “murderous petro-state” or if their club goes out on a limb—as Bohs did— to host the Palestinian women’s football team’s first ever match in Europe.
Comparatively, Donnchadh says, Shels have historically been terrible at this. The club’s tapping up of Hope for a clubhouse beer is part of a belated wider community outreach to the club’s Northside surroundings and local businesses.
Des, for his part, is proud Hope has been adopted as one of their own by Shels, and proud to be considered a North County Dublin brewery, proud their beers are pouring in neighbourhood pubs, and proud to support not just Shels but the local GAA and tennis clubs too. “There's an intangible benefit to this rootedness,” Richie says. “It means something for us to be able to say, ‘we’re the beer from around here’.”
Dublin’s breweries and its football clubs would have been successful without their respective collaborations, but that they’ve experienced their twin revivals in parallel but interconnected journeys like a double helix speaks to a more fundamental change in Irish attitudes, a renewed self-confidence and a reaction to the flattening impulses of globalisation, that encompassed not just sport but also the creative arts and the wider culture.
““These are our bands, these are our clubs. It’s phenomenal.””
“I wouldn’t call it a cultural reawakening,” says Barry Crossan, friend of Donnchadh, fellow ‘Riversider,’ and editor of club fanzine Red Inc. “But there is a bit of a feeling of, ‘These are our bands, these are our clubs.’ It’s phenomenal.”
But if international capital is good at anything, it’s the co-option of alternative cultural movements. Multinational breweries buy independent breweries. Big brands supplant local businesses on pitchside advertising hoardings. Dublin’s football clubs and breweries have done well to recover from their 20th century nadirs, but can they maintain their renewed relationship as the self-styled Greatest League in the World™ becomes a hot commercial property as the heat around Dublin’s beer scene is cooling?
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Dan Lambert, Bohs’ chief operating officer (and manager of Irish hip-hop trio Kneecap,) says you can see the Guinness brewery from Dalymount Park, which for a long time featured an advert on the main stand encouraging spectators to “win or lose—head for a Guinness.” On the 12th of February 2025 the club renewed this relationship, releasing a new Guinness-sponsored jersey, joining previous shirt releases featuring Thin Lizzy, Refugees Welcome, and Dublin band Fontaines D.C..
Shirt sales have become a huge part of Bohs’ business model, Lambert says, and given Guinness is recognisable in far-flung places where people have never heard of Bohemians, the partnership made sound business sense.
Nevertheless, for a club that hosts a “non-corporate” box at Dalymount Park, a collaboration with one of the world’s biggest drinks companies furrowed some brows. Outside the club, people rehashed resentments about Diageo’s jettisoning of the St. James’s Gate club—the old Guinness works team that won the inaugural League of Ireland in 1921—leading to its demise in 2022.
Lambert says internal fan pushback has been limited. Even fans like Lisa Grimm, adopted Dubliner, writer and co-host of the Beer Ladies Podcast with Dr. Christina Wade, says that while it wouldn’t have been her first choice of breweries to work with, the club still has to make money.
“When your club is owned by Ireland’s second richest man…you can take a [financial] hit,” club historian Gerry Farrell tells me. “We can't, because we own the club, and always have. So [if] we have to flog some shirts, I have no qualms about doing that.”
More concerning was the announcement in December 2024, that Diageo’s Rockshore full-strength and non-alcoholic Lagers were the League’s new official beers. They followed this up in May 2025 with the launch of a Rockshore-themed fan bar at Tolka Park.
““All we’re doing with this club is minding it for the next generation””
These big money moves shouldn’t be surprising; “League of Ireland football is sexy now,” Rascals’ Joe Donnelly says. “They just have to… always keep in mind that you're rooted in a community.”
Dermot Looney of St. Pat’s tells me that Dublin’s clubs shouldn’t get blinded by the prospect of a new gold rush. “All we're doing with this club is minding it for the next generation.”
The brewers themselves are relatively sanguine about these developments. Just as the clubs have accepted a degree of cohabitation with the ever-present English Premier League (EPL), because they can’t stop people having a second team, they too have accepted—at least in the stadium bars—the inevitable presence of Guinness, Heineken, and their subordinate brands, because that’s just what most people drink.
Elsewhere, however, it’s this duopoly that worries brewers in an industry still recovering from the overlapping impacts of Covid-19 and the cost-of-living crisis. The pre-pandemic era of rapid expansion is over, Hope’s Des McSwiggan says, but breweries like his have been able keep growing slowly but steadily by redoubling their community outreach efforts and, in a mirror image of the tribalism of the footballing counterparts, carving up the city into distinct catchment areas: Hope in North County Dublin, Rascals in Inchicore and the southside, and Trouble, a bit of everywhere (just like Bohs.)
Though their trajectories look to be diverging, it’s unlikely fans will stop coming to Rascals for pre-match pints, unlikely that Hope will stop brewing 1895, and unlikely Trouble are going to pull their taps from Dalymount, even if the brewery never makes another Euro from them. It’s never been about the money for Stephen Clinch, just like it’s never been about winning.
It’s about pre-match pints of Ambush in the Members’ Bar. It’s about sitting in the Jodi Stand shouting yourself hoarse with the other lunatics. “It's about pints with your friends, and sometimes you win and sometimes, you lose,” he says. “That's life for me. I'm with my mates. That's all I need. I just love football.”
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