The setting is instantly familiar. There’s a small donkey who likes to mingle with the locals, a low-raftered pub and a wild Achill Island coastal setting visible through a small sash window. However, the real-life version of JJ Devine’s pub from The Banshees of Inisherin, Martin McDonagh’s surprise Hollywood success from 2022, differs from its onscreen portrayal in a number of ways.
The bar is located on a vast plain of lush fields in a remote village about 100 or so kilometres south-east of the desolate beauty of Achill. The donkey isn’t a sidekick of Padraic (Colin Farrell); it’s a local beauty called Holly. And, of course, the ocean view is stencilled on to the window.
“I saw the movie and I was intrigued by the bar,” JJ Devine’s owner, Luke Mee, told me over a pint of Guinness. On the other side of the pub, local musicians were entertaining the residents of Kilkerrin, a tiny two-pub hamlet lost in a coil of narrow roads in County Galway.
“My sister lives on Achill,” Mee said. “So I called her up and asked her if she knew what happened to the pub once filming had finished, because her husband would be in the know as he worked in security on the set.”
“And guess what?” he said with a frothy smile. “She said Tom, her husband, might have that.”
Mee, 52, who owns a number of pubs and a garage in the region, had a truck on Achill Island within a week. He and a friend, Michael Kelly, loaded it with the carcass of one of cinema’s best-known bars, which was lying in a pile at the bottom of his sister’s field.
“Tom told me: if you want it, just take it off my hands for free,” Mee said.
Kelly, Luke’s best friend, arrived at the table with his pint of Guinness. We were also joined by local politician Michael Connolly and another customer, Pat Diskin, in long beard and fisherman’s hat.
The men all competed to finish the story of how JJ Devine’s became the landmark attraction of this starkly populated village in County Galway’s farming heartland. The pub was assembled late at night between February and June by Mee and Kelly beneath the shed in the back yard of Mee’s pub and shop.
“We kept it hidden behind a screen, because, in these parts, word travels fast and we wanted to keep a lid on it all until it was ready to open,” Mee said.
As the music grew louder, Holly the donkey had had enough and turned in for the evening. Cathal Boyle, a sprightly man whose head almost reached the rafters of the dimly lit room, took this as his cue to dance – his version of the traditional solo sean-nós – with a swagger and sidestep as he reached for the ceiling intermittently.
“I’ve no training,” Boyle shouted over to us with a mixture of irony and pride on his face.
“You’d never guess,” Kelly said.
