The Thomas House, 86 Thomas Street, Dublin 8

One word: Ha! Never was there a more cautionary tale of Celtic Tiger excess than this place here. I passed by it recently and admittedly danced a little jig of schadenfreudic glee at its demise. What do you do if you have a cool, authentic, small, old, run down little pub, right next to an art college, with relaxed staff, music on every night of the week, with queues out the door at the weekend, with people like Andy Weatherall playing surprise DJ sets there, with people up dancing on the tables and chairs in a raucous atmosphere, having a great time, and pouring money into the tills of the pub? Why, you shut it down for a couple of years of course! Thereby alienating any of the regular clientele you had who felt they had a bit of ownership over the place by organising the music nights there, and then renovate it into a soulless, steel and black leather, generic boozer that you could find in any other part of the city, with zero character and zero atmosphere, build some equally generic apartments over it, and what do you get? A derelict pub! Here's a word of advice for any would be investors out there who think that gutting a pub and making it nice and new and fancy will suddenly bring in a load more business (another example at the moment is Walsh's in Stoneybatter) - LEAVE IT THE FUCK ALONE. Some of your customers might actually like the old tattered seats, the carpets, the welcoming smell of generations of spilled beer. The Thomas House tried to recapture its cool with DJs and the like, performing in the non-space of upstairs, and occasionally getting a crowd in downstairs in the miserable basement, but to be honest I'm glad its closed, may it stand as a shining example of the idiocy of killing the goose that lays the golden egg in early 2000's Dublin.