A pub in Smithfield where traditional music is played properly, in a corner, by musicians who came to play rather than to perform. Free, nightly, and not for talking over.
What a session is
A traditional session is not a gig. Musicians sit in a circle in a corner of a pub, unamplified, and play tunes they all know — reels, jigs, hornpipes, slow airs — with people joining and leaving through the evening. There is no set list, no stage, no ticket, and no applause between tunes within a set.
It is a social form rather than a performance, which is why the etiquette matters and why a pub full of people talking over it kills it.
The Cobblestone has run one nightly for decades. The Mulligan family have kept the pub for five generations, the front bar is small and wood-panelled, and the musicians are frequently very good indeed — this is where players go on their night off.
The etiquette, briefly
Do not talk over the tunes. Between sets is fine. There is a sign, and it is not decorative.
Do not request anything, and do not ask them to play Galway Girl.
Do not film them for more than a few seconds without asking. They are not buskers.
Do sit close and listen. Nobody minds an interested stranger; everybody minds an audience that treats it as background.
The campaign
In 2021 a developer proposed a nine-storey hotel on the site, retaining the bar but demolishing the back room and yard where the pub runs classes and gigs. The objection was enormous — thousands marched — and the planning application was refused. It is a useful thing to know about the place: Dublin has lost a great many venues in the last decade and this one was defended in the street.
Where else
Hughes’s on Chancery Street, behind the Four Courts.
O’Donoghue’s on Merrion Row, where the Dubliners started, which is now well known and busy and still good.
The Piper’s Corner on Marlborough Street.
Walsh’s in Stoneybatter, five minutes from the Cobblestone.
What none of these is: the pubs in Temple Bar advertising “traditional Irish music” on a sandwich board with an amplifier and a set list. That is a different product sold to a different audience at four times the price of a pint elsewhere.
Practical
Free. Sessions typically start around 7pm and run late; the back room has ticketed gigs.
It gets full and it is a small bar. Arriving early is the difference between sitting and standing.
