Superfans of The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) have had a lot to celebrate this summer. Last month, Ireland announced that it would pay people to move to its remote islands—including Inis Mór, one of Banshees’ filming locations.
Now, Food & Wine reports that the pub featured in the film is no longer a fictional place: One enterprising man rescued the dismantled set and fashioned it into a fully operational bar in County Galway, Ireland.
Luke Mee, the owner of Mee’s Bar in the village of Kilkerrin, said in an interview on BBC’s Good Morning Ulster that he started to wonder why nobody had turned the discarded edifice into a tourist attraction.
After asking around for intel about what might’ve happened to the pub, he discovered it to be in the possession of his own brother-in-law, who worked security for the film and planned to use it as timber. “I said … ‘I’ll buy it off you,’” Mee said. “And he said, ‘You won’t. … If you want it, you can have it for nothing.’” So Mee and company carted the cargo back to Kilkerrin and secretly assembled it inside a shed at Mee’s Bar. “It had to go indoors,” Mee explained. “It was only a temporary structure; it wouldn’t survive the elements.”
The J.J. Devine Public House is now open for business—be that business a casual pint at the end of your work day or the destruction of a friendship that will alter your life in unforeseeable and surprisingly grisly ways. For what it’s worth, Mee told The Irish Post that they “have a ban on cutting fingers off and throwing them.”
What they haven’t banned are animal patrons: A local donkey named Holly stops by from time to time. “Holly loves all the attention, and everyone loves Holly, of course,” Mee said.
This article was originally published on www.mentalfloss.com as The Pub From ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’ Is Now a Real Place.
