A long way to Tipperary: Visiting Shane MacGowan’s favourite pub
It sounds like the set-up to a joke: “An undertaker walks into a bar”. Only in this case, the undertaker is the bartender, and the scene is something more akin to a Pogues song.
Philip ‘Philly’ Ryan is the man in question. When he’s not operating the pub that bears his name in Nenagh, County Tipperary, he’s over at the local funeral home, JJ Ryan’s, helping people prepare for the great big bar in the sky. It should come as no surprise – based not only on the title of this article but the romantic absurdity of these details – Mr Ryan was also a close acquaintance of Tipperary’s favourite son Shane MacGowan, who frequented Philly Ryan’s pub for many a year.
Along with holding court as the most famous patron of Nenagh’s oldest public house, MacGowan would occasionally bring his famous friends by, as well, including a legendary occasion back in 2001 when the Pogues frontman swung by with the Clash’s Joe Strummer in tow—a grand night immortalised by several mementos at the bar, including signed notes from both men and a photo of the duo alongside Philly Ryan himself.
Ryan wasn’t just the landlord at Shane MacGowan’s favourite pub, though. He had also earned enough trust from the singer over the years that MacGowan directly recruited him for the much bigger role of handling his funeral. It was a topic first raised, according to Ryan, back in 2017. MacGowan was well aware by this point that he’d dodged the Grim Reaper an unrealistic number of times already, and that the clock was catching up to him.
“Shane was there in a wheelchair,” Ryan told the Independent in 2023, recalling the conversation he had with MacGowan at a birthday party for Shane’s wife Victoria. “I could see he wasn’t well. He just beckoned me over at some stage and said, ‘I want to sort everything out.’ I said, ‘Look, Shane, I hear you, but we don’t really need to talk about this now.’ That is a natural thing to say as an undertaker.
“That conversation is harder than doing any funeral, believe it or not,” Ryan added. “Somebody looking at you and telling you what they want. It is very hard for people to understand.”
Six years later, despite never drawing up formal paperwork, Philip Ryan was true to his promise to MacGowan, transporting the singer’s body from Dublin after his death and helping his widow with the complicated arrangement of the funeral in Nenagh – an intimate affair that simultaneously carried the weight of thousands of mourners in the small Irish town and millions more all around the world.
“I suppose I feel privileged,” Ryan said during the week of the funeral, “And I just hope I can honour him well on his last instruction.”
After the emotional funeral, the Philip Ryan Pub suddenly became a place of worldwide notoriety and one of pilgrimage for Pogues fans. Along with a mural of MacGowan on the outside of the building, a commissioned portrait by the artist Will McNally also now hangs inside the pub, having been presented personally to Shane’s sister Siobhan here in 2024.
To mark the two-year anniversary of MacGowan’s parting, Philly Ryan’s put on several tribute events just this past month, with various musicians playing the songs of the man who used to come to this place not just for impromptu gigs, but to quietly read a book or shoot some pool.
Tributes aside, it’s worth noting that the pub’s connection to MacGowan hasn’t been something it has exploited or widely promoted to the outside world. The official Philip Ryan website looks pretty well untouched over the past decade, and its last Facebook post came in 2018. Still, in case you’re thinking of stopping by or planning an event of your own at Philly Ryan’s, we assume this message from its site would hold true now as it did when it was posted, probably 20 years ago:
“All types of parties are catered for, music and finger food can be provided, and a private meeting room is available.”
