The Confession Box

The Confession Box is one of the smallest pubs in Dublin and one of the most-historic. It sits on Marlborough Street directly across from St Mary’s Pro-Cathedral, in a building that has been a pub continuously since the 1880s. The name comes from the War of Independence, when priests sympathetic to Michael Collins took confessions from IRA members at the bar — technically the only way to absolve them, since Rome had excommunicated all republican volunteers. Collins himself drank here regularly.

The room is tiny. Maybe twenty standing inside, six on the snug bench, four at the small back tables. The interior has not been renovated in any meaningful sense in forty years: dark-stained wood, brass rail, etched glass partition, an honest pile of GAA pennants behind the bar. There is one television set high in the corner that plays Gaelic football and hurling matches when they’re on, soccer when they’re not. The Guinness pour is one of the most-rehearsed in the city — the staff settle each pint properly and the line discipline shows.

Not a sports bar in the Yard House sense. This is a Dublin local that takes its match days seriously and shows GAA games on a single working television. On a county-final Sunday the room is full an hour before throw-in and the energy is what the ranking is about. On a normal weeknight it’s a quiet, old-Dublin pub a stop from Connolly Station that earns its place on any honest list of the city’s drinking rooms.