CHARLIE’S BAR, 2 UNION QUAY, CORK CITY, IRELAND

A trail of faecal matter led from the bar to its source on the toilet’s floor

Charlie's Bar is a filthy dive in Cork city centre.

This is a Cork city-centre pub with a milieu that’d slice your senses like a chain-saw cutting butter. The landlady looks exactly like Shrek minus the trumpet ears and personality – she displays all the traits of a rabid dog that’s just had his food wrestled from him.  

She looks for likewise traits in her staff and, as far as we could see, has been 100% successful. This landlady and her employees keep their surroundings, and their clientèle, at subnormal levels, as if they have a strong desire to reflect their own mental qualities.

The disgusting state of this pub’s interior will absolutely astound if you’re ever unfortunate enough to visit.

A friend and I called here on a Monday evening more out of need to use a toilet rather than to have a drink. When we entered we got the obligatory aggressive looks and snarls from the dwarfish ill-bred barmaid; but being used to Cork city and it’s Neanderthal inhabitants my friend tentatively ordered drinks and I made for the WC.  

Faecal matter floods the floor.

There’s was no signs indicating where this was except an obvious trail of urine outlined footprints which led from the bar to a door in the corner. The lavatory consisted of just one toilet bowl which was housed in a cubicle that was barely wide enough to take a normal sized person – a domestic cat wouldn’t be able to stretch his tail in it.  

There was no urinal, hand dryer, towels or soap but the absence of these were incidental compared to what immediately attacked my senses. What hit me (and my nose) like a sledge-hammer was that a patron or staff member1 had evacuated their intestines down the outside of the toilet bowl and onto the floor.

The person who did this would have had to have been determined to miss the bowl as the cubicle was not much wider than an average person’s butt. His or her buttocks would have been squashed against the very filthy side of the cubicle in an uncomfortable position; although judging by the diarrhoea that was ejected it didn’t take them long to do their business.

The type of morons who'll greet
you in most Cork establishments.

There’s a very good chance that the person who did this viewed it as a joke; the type of unstable morons who’s to be encountered in Cork city has a sense of humour that’d be more at home in lunatic asylums.

Generations of cousins marrying and inbreeding with each other is the order of the day in south-west Ireland; a habit which gives rise to inordinate numbers of insane, aggressive and slack-jawed offspring.

My friend and I quickly exited this disgusting dive without having or paying for the drinks that had been slammed on the counter; we were more than glad to get outside and fill our lungs with fresh air.

The following Friday evening I popped in again just to see if the monkey-type bar staff or owner had made any departure from their Neanderthal ways. They hadn't, the aggressive female dwarf was still snarling behind the bar, and the diarrhoea was still splattered all around the toilet bowl – the only upside was that it had dried out and didn’t smell as bad as it had on Monday.

I have heard the natives of south-west Ireland compared to animals but I wouldn’t entirely agree with this comparison. That’s because animals don’t urinate and defecate in their own dens, lairs, nests or burrows and then stomp around in it.

_________________________________ 1Bar workers, and generally any kind of  staff, in Cork city are apt to be as ignorant and  coarse as brain-damaged monkeys.