Watching Notre Dame football in a Dublin pub provides an education
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DUBLIN — At first Rich Wright was confused.
Driving through Ireland on holiday, the Fortville, Ind., resident wasn’t expecting to see this capital city awash in blue and gold and a certain interlocking logo.
“I thought the game was next week,” Wright said Saturday as he watched Notre Dame football blast Navy 42-3 on the big-screen television at Kennedy’s Pub & Restaurant. “I saw everyone wearing Notre Dame stuff, and I was like, ‘Hey, what are you guys doing here?’ “
A maintenance worker at a VA facility who lives about 35 minutes northeast of Indianapolis, Wright got into town a few hours before kickoff and tried to find a pub that was showing the game. On his fourth stop he found Kennedy’s, where the Notre Dame Club of Ireland was hosting a watch party downstairs.
“I saw the balloons and the signs outside and decided to go in,” Wright said. “I was upstairs for the first half, and it was packed. I came down here for the second half.”
With a “Play Like a Champion” sign in one corner and a remote NBC-TV camera on a tripod in another, Wright was welcomed warmly to a gathering that reached nearly 70 attendees during a pregame reception for international Notre Dame alumni.
Many of those Fighting Irish fans from New Zealand, Spain, England and Switzerland made the manageable walk together over to Aviva Stadium, where Sam Hartman passed for four touchdowns in his Notre Dame debut.
Wright’s main takeaway as he nursed a pint of Guinness: “I wish we had the quarterback for more than a year.”
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Instead of Brittny Ryan being asked if she had any questions for the pharmacist, her country pharmacist had a question for her.
“Brittny, what the heck is going on in Dublin?” he asked when she stopped in on Friday. “I see all the people with your logo on your shirt that you wear all the time. What are they doing here?”
A 2006 Notre Dame graduate who works as a self-employed TV producer, Ryan is co-president of the Dublin Chapter of the Notre Dame Club. After she explained the Fighting Irish invasion and the concept of the College Football Classic, her pharmacist ended up bringing his wife and two of their teenage sons to the watch party.
A third son scored a ticket on the secondary market and headed over to Aviva Stadium.
“They’ve been greatly entertained by the American football experience,” said Ryan, whose maiden name was Heinrich and who has two children of her own with husband Sean Ryan, an Irish engineer.
Typical Notre Dame football watch parties at Kennedy’s are free to the alumni club, which doesn’t even collect annual dues, but Saturday’s gathering carried a cost of $15 Euro to help offset the food outlay. That was still far more affordable than trying to watch the blowout in person.
Dr. Kate McCann, a 2000 Notre Dame graduate who attended…
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