Featuring sean-nós versions of ‘Like A Virgin’ and a risque Irish aural exam, a night that began at a birthday party has become the unlikely setting for a Gaelic revival

IT'S ST Patrick's night, and while most of the capital's population and their tourist counterparts fall around the streets jubilantly dressed in oversized leprechaun hats and vodka and Red Bull-soaked tricolours, a packed crowd of young people are inside one city pub, enthusiastically tapping their feet to Phil the Fluter's Ballbefore undergoing a slightly risque Irish aural exam.

The basement of a gay bar on Capel Street in Dublin’s city centre isn’t the most likely setting for a Gaelic revival, but stranger things have happened in Pantibar.

Poorhouseis the creation of Leitrim man Dónal Mulligan, a multimedia lecturer in Dublin City University who has brought what was originally a themed house party to the masses.

It's primarily a sean nós night – yes, that's right, a sean nós club night – that mixes music with poetry, performance with song, nostalgia with culture, packaged for a gay audience and their straight friends. On St Patrick's night, Poorhouse ended by moving upstairs to the main floor of Pantibar where vigorous céilí dancing ensued ( The Siege of Ennisfollowed by The Walls of Limerick, to be exact.)

As he plans the fourth instalment of Poorhouse, no one seems to be more surprised about its success than Mulligan himself, saying that the night has “filled a niche that I don’t think I even knew was there”.

Poorhouse’s roots are in a 25th birthday party Mulligan threw in his apartment in Smithfield five years ago, asking his friends to come along and sing, play or perform something vaguely sean nós-related. When he moved apartments and didn’t have the same amount of space for the annual shindig, he figured he’d take a punt on offering the concept up for a gay audience. The first night happened last December at the height of the freezing snowy weather, “the IMF were circling and things were very bad, that’s why it took off. I think something about those conditions made people connect . . . The stories on the news were shite, but then maybe that’s what fuelled it, it was a sort of ‘F you’ to all the bad news that Ireland was going down the toilet. I suppose people were thinking let’s reconnect with this older heritage of Ireland that we can be proud of.”

On the second night, people turned up with fiddles and flutes. By the third event, strangers were turning to each other and starting conversations in Irish. "This odd gay Gaelic revival has happened around it," Mulligan says. Participation from the floor is encouraged. "It's really surprising how many people know an Irish poem or a song and they have no other outlet to ever perform it," Mulligan says, mentioning performances by strangers of Gleantain Ghlas, Ghaoth Dobhairand Raglan Roadas highlights of audience participation.

Each Poorhouse night is announced with playful videos that reenact old Irish television advertisements – so far Kerrygold and Barry’s Tea have fallen victim to hilariously distorted, cheesy nostalgia with a camp filter. But although the promotional material for Poorhouse is heavy on irony, much of the content of the nights themselves is remarkably serious.

That said, with a tagline that proclaims "party like it's 1845", Poorhouse doesn't promise the supremely diligent and ordered format of traditional session, hence performances such as a sean nós version of Madonna's Like A Virginby the drag artist and Pantibar landlady Panti at the first event. "Those things lighten it up," Mulligan explains, "it would be too much if it was just sad songs about repression for the night. Part of the alchemy of keeping it going is mixing it up."

Sitting in the Front Lounge bar on Parliament Street, Mulligan makes references to the céilí the bar hosts during Gay Pride. “A few more of those during the year would be no harm,” he says. “It’s a fantastic way to meet people, and I see why céilís worked in the old days because you end up dancing with everybody. You might end up making a fool of yourself, but you do that with some new hot man, and sure, there you are!”

For more information and future Poorhouse events, see pantibar.com