DEATH ANNOUNCEMENT
PATRICK JOSEPH NOLAN
“Paddy”
14 September 1938 – 11 June 2021
Guinness fermenting-room foreman, Shamrock Rovers man and Crumlin's unofficial bike mender
There is a particular sound a full cask makes when it is rolled across cobbles, and Paddy Nolan could tell you from three streets away whether the man rolling it knew his business. For forty-five years at the Guinness brewery in St James's Gate, he was nearly always the man who did.
Patrick Joseph Nolan was born in 1938 in a two-room flat off Thomas Street in the Liberties, the fourth of eight children of a docker and a washerwoman. He left school at fourteen, and two years later he walked through the gate at St James's with a letter from the parish priest and a borrowed tie. He started as a labourer in the brewhouse, moved to the fermenting room, and by the time he retired in 1999 he was the foreman who could smell, he claimed, a batch that was a day behind. Guinness gave its workers two pints a day; Paddy drank his slowly, in strict order, and only after the shift was done.
He met Maureen Gilligan at a céilí in Inchicore in 1961, danced one dance badly, and married her the following year in St Catherine's Church on Meath Street. They moved to a council house in Crumlin, where they raised Declan and Sinéad and where the kettle was never cold. Paddy was a Shamrock Rovers man to his bones; he stood on the terraces at Glenmalure Park through the trophy years and the lean ones, and said that the ground's closing in 1987 had taken ten years off his life. He sang 'The Auld Triangle' at every family wedding, flat and with feeling, and nobody ever stopped him.
He mended bikes for the neighbourhood children, kept a plot of beans and sweet peas out the back, and believed that the best pint in the world is the one poured by someone who knows exactly how long it takes. After retirement he walked every day to the canal at Portobello to feed the swans, who knew him by name. Paddy died peacefully on 11 June 2021 at Our Lady's Hospice in Harold's Cross, with Maureen holding his hand. He leaves Maureen, Declan, Sinéad and five grandchildren.
“A good pint takes time, and so does a good life.”