There’s a difference between a Dublin pub as promoted by Failte Ireland and a thousand Irish songs, and real Dublin pubs. Failte Ireland pubs are awful. Dublin pubs are great.

The first difference between the pub of the popular imagination and the real pub is the smell. Good Dublin pubs smell of wet coats, cheap toilet cleaner and farts. If the pub smells of Thai food, expensive aftershave or furniture polish, turn on your heals and leave. Proper pubs don’t serve food. They serve drink, Tayto and Manhattan peanuts. You might occasionally get a toastie which come in two flavours – ham and cheese or a special (ham and cheese and a slice of tomato, cooked to approximately the temperature of the sun).

Avoid Tayto crisps. They’re awful bags of thin, oniony slices of disappointment, designed to get stuck between your teeth and make your beer taste funny. Irish people go on and on about Tayto, but that’s just a national failing like the French love of disco music or the British interest in dogging.

Irrespective of the time of day, a good pub has at least one old man sitting at a high stool at the bar or some other useful vantage spot watching the racing or reading the Herald through rheumy eyes. He’s a useful person in the Irish pub scene, even if he is responsible for the farty smell. His role is to ensure that there’s a constant movement of Guinness through the pipes all day, so that when you arrive, your pint is poured from freshly moving beer, rather than stagnant stuff which has been sitting since last night. He might be a bit smelly, but so would you if you gave your life to such a noble cause and lived on a diet of Tayto and Joe Duffy.

A good pub will be recognised by its decoration. A fake pub is decorated in wood panelling, rubbed brasses and darkened mirrors advertising mysterious whiskey and Tullamore Dew (another thing to be avoided – Tullamore, I mean). The wrong pub likes to give the impression of being lit by gaslight. It will be home to a thousand cubbyholes and niches, for aspiring Joyces to write impenetrable books about the human condition.

Avoid them. The aspiring writers especially.

Real pubs are lit by fluorescent lights like an industrial kitchen, rendering all of their customers pale and drawn, and creating such deep shadows that the mice have no need for the power of sight.

The decoration will be minimalist, bare other than walls painted in custard-colour gloss paint and a garish photograph of the 1983 Mayo Senior Football team taken by the landlord’s brother. There might be a calendar hanging on a nail beside the door, or a photo of Michael Collins and JFK (bonus points if the photo shows them shaking hands). But apart from that, the walls should be bare so as not to distract the customer from his drink.

A good Dublin pub is staffed by a fat man in a pale blue shirt and black trousers or a woman of such extreme age that she looks like an escapee from the National Museum’s Bog People exhibit.

Good Dublin barmen are known by their uniform. Just as priests have special shops, so too do Dublin barmen. After all, very few self-respecting shops sell drip-dry nylon shirts in pale blue or slacks which shine quite so loudly.

The barman is unlikely to be a fanatical devotee of the hundred thousand welcomes school of service provision. He will give the impression of hating every second of his life, and seems to aspire to using as few words as possible, as if they were rationed.

There is a sentence which gives joy to all devotees of the Dublin pub. A sentence more powerful than “I love you,” more welcome than “the cheque is in the post” or more longed for then “I’m sorry Mr Cowen but we forgot to set up your pension fund.”

The sentence is “I’ll drop them down to you.”

When the publican says he’ll drop your pints down to you, it’s pretty much the best thing in the world. You go back to your mates at the table, and in a couple of minutes, the drinks will arrive with, if not a smile and a “have a nice day” then briskness and efficiency.

During the course of the night as the drink and the craic flow (“the craic” is Irish for “talking authoritatively about stuff you know nothing about and bitching about the prices”) you may feel the need to visit the facilities, in the hopes of taking the pressure of your bladder and fishing bits of Manhattan peanuts out of your fillings.

Everyone who knows good Dublin pubs will know about the toilets. It’s a little known fact that deep-sea divers use Dublin pub toilets to train holding their breath. They banned smoking in Dublin pubs not to improve the working conditions, but the fear that the fumes in the toilets were probably flammable.

In Les Miserables, there’s a song which goes: “From the table in the corner / They could see a world reborn / And they rose with voices ringing.” Yeah, that doesn’t happen in Dublin pubs. The Easter Rising could never have been organised from the table in the corner of a Dublin pub. The Iron Curtain would still be hanging if the revolutionaries had decided to meet in the back room of Kehoe’s to plot the fall of Communism. Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t pop into McDaid’s for a pint before taking his position in the Texas School Book Depository.

From the table in the corner of a Dublin pub, you can’t see a brave new world, all you can see is the arse-crack of the man at the bar and the door of the gents, but nonetheless, the table in the corner of a proper Dublin pub with your mates on a Sunday night is probably the best place in the world to be. Just don’t tell the tourists.