Hideout sets the date, nearly
The pub, currently undergoing a complete redesign and refurbishment for new owner Jonathan Keogh, has announced that via the opening of a Facebook page and Twitter account - TheHideoutKilcullen and @HideoutCillDar respectively.
It will be managed by Martin Lambe, who worked in the pub in an early part of his career in the licensed trade and the security industry. The new operation will serve food seven days a week from noon until 9pm, and there will be DJ music on Fridays and Saturdays, with a live band on Sundays.
This latest regeneration of the business opens a new chapter in a very interesting history of the premises at the crossroads in Kilcullen.
There's an unconfirmed reference to the building being operated as the Magnolia Hotel, from around 1855 when it is thought to have been built on the site of a yard with outhouses as seen on the 1846 Ordnance Survey maps.
One Edward Leigh, first referenced as the owner in 1881, was the licensee up to June 1901, when the business was transferred to Mary Anne Murphy. In 1903, the property was acquired by grocer and wine merchant Patrick Flanagan of Naas, possibly through marriage to Mary Anne Murphy. He renamed it as Flanagan's Motor Bar in time to capitalise on the running of the international Gordon Bennett Race in the summer of that year. A contemporary photograph shows the French team in their cars parked on the road outside the bar. They had been staying in Bardons Hotel for the duration of the race.
The business was taken over by Mrs Alice Moylan in September 1924, and she continued it under The Motor Bar name.
In December 1925, James J Byrne, a local businessesman whose own father had operated a bar and grocery in Kilcullen from the mid-1800s (where Eurospar is today), bought the business from Mrs Moylan and reopened it as Byrnes Hotel, assigning the licence tenancy to his older sister Annie. He began trading on Christmas Eve of that year, and there's family lore that the takings on the first day were £17, when a bottle of stout cost 6d. There's no record of it being run as a hotel, as he and his family lived above the public house part of the premises.
The eldest son James Jr, 'Jim', took over the business in 1950 and turned it into a themed pub with log interior walls, which soon became repositories of an eclectic collection of memorabilia and eccentric artefacts. What was to become the most famous of these was the mummified right arm of the 19th century pugilist Dan Donnelly. Down the years, the pub gathered a reputation that went global, without the aid of the as yet to be invented internet.
Following Jim Byrne's passing in the early 1980s, the Hideout went into the ownership of his son, the late Des, and his wife Josephine. Des had already been managing the business since 1977. In the mid-90s, Des retired from the business and it was sold. Since then it has had a number of owners. It had been closed for some time before being bought by local businessman Jonathan Keogh late last year.
The project to bring it back from 'darkness' is being filmed as an episode in the next series of 'At Your Service' on RTE TV, featuring Francis and John Brennan.
