About
Eventually his wife Kerry told him she didn't want another one in the backyard. So he put one on wheels and called it a business.
The Irish Rover is what he came up with: an eighteen-foot, hand-built mobile pub modeled after Dublin's Temple Bar, parked in your backyard for a night.
Patrick has a thing about pubs.
Before The Irish Rover, he'd already built a sports bar inside the house and a crab shack out by the pool. Each one themed, each one his own.
The Irish Rover is the first one with wheels. It's also the first one that leaves the property, which is the whole point. Patrick's Parked Pubs is the company name because the tiki bar trailer might be next.
If you're hiring someone to park a pub in your backyard, you want it to be the guy who's been building them at home for fun.
This isn't his first one.
Patrick and Kerry got engaged at Ashford Castle. Kerry was born a Connolly. Patrick went all in.
They took their five daughters back to Ireland this year for the kind of trip that only really happens once. Three soccer games. The Galway horse races. The All-Ireland Gaelic football final, eighty-two thousand five hundred fans, sold out.
Patrick came home with a specific pub in mind: the corner of Temple Lane and the entrance to St. James's Gate. The two most photographed buildings in Dublin, on a single trailer.
It started in Ireland.
Patrick sketched it on graph paper. The exterior. The interior layout. The barrel placement. The bar height. He took those sketches to a builder he trusts and they figured out how to turn them into something that could survive being towed at 65 miles an hour.
Eighteen feet long. Eight and a half feet wide. Sixteen people inside. Real bar, real snug, real working tap. The exterior gets the Temple Bar treatment on the front and the Guinness Gate on the back.The signage came from Ireland, eBay, and wherever else Patrick could find it.
Every detail is meticulous – the kind of meticulous you can only get from someone who builds bars at his house for fun.
Hand-drawn, hand-built.
