Brianna Parkins: Seeing tourists from your own country on holidays can be cringeworthy

I like a hotel bar. It feels treasonous to say that now, living in Dublin, where it feels like they’ve knocked down all the proper pubs in my area to put them up.

Irish pubs globally have become shorthand for “decent boozer”, which is why we can find signs advertising Kitty O’Shea’s Aul Shillelagh Pub written in Celtic font in American strip malls.

You never see the word “pub” written over actual pubs in Ireland. Just like we never put a tag on cattle that says “cows”.

Geopolitically, Irish pubs could be seen as a creeping spread of soft power, advancing our interests as a nation, one vintage Guinness poster and framed Ireland jersey at a time. Maybe this is what happens when you don’t have a big enough defence force to ensure your protection. In the event we come under attack, we hope some superpower will go “ah the Irish, yeah we should go help them, have you had a baby Guinness? Yeah they’re sound out.”

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While you can’t beat real Irish bars for authenticity, a hotel bar has a time and place.

Drinking in a hotel bar feels sophisticated. You are people-watching. You are a character in a film noir movie. A local, dark pub makes you feel less like a flâneur and more like grandad, who definitely drank because he was trying to avoid his family at home.

Hotel bars, for this reason, are excellent places to retreat to when you have a fight with a significant other. You can have a glass of wine and go all French and wonder if suffering in monogamy is the human condition, or whether you should take a lover instead.

Joining us at the bar are the ‘here for work’ people. There are no points for spotting them

Or you can just get a Coca-Cola with a slice of lemon and ponder whether the risk of dengue fever is a valid excuse to get you out of the camping trip with the in-laws your partner unilaterally signed you up to. Or how many times you can be asked where the scissors are before they become a murder weapon, because the other person hasn’t even bothered to check the “shite drawer”.

Joining us at the bar are the “here for work” people. There are no points for spotting them. That’s like playing eye-spy in the car with your seven-year-old cousin and correctly guessing the road every time he hints “it’s something beginning with R”. They are wearing an outfit bought in the “business casual” section. They are usually sitting in front of those laptops that look more like tablets with a keyboard attached, which make them look like big toddlers who have been given iPads so they behave when the family goes out to dinner. This is their version of downtime, doing emails with an expensed Sauvignon Blanc. Poor craythurs. But they feel very important.

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Then there are the people on holidays, arguably the happiest to be here out of the lot. Recently in a hotel bar, I watched an American family teach their teenage son how to play 21 with the poker sets put out on the tables. The whole thing was so wholesome and joyful it made me nervous, because it felt like a scene in a movie right before a loving family’s life is changed forever by a horrifying event. But I guess that’s just Americans for you, with their ability to express love directly. I could see this becoming a core memory for the young lad; he would always remember his parents teaching him this game, and the laughter whenever he plays it in the future.

They were interrupted by a pack of Australian couples enjoying a post-retirement trip around “Oi-land”. They asked to borrow a chair, and the Americans joked it would cost them a beer. “In that case, I’ll take three moight,” the Australian shot back. I cringed, the way you do at the behaviour of fellow countrymen abroad. As if they’re showing us all up by doing the exact same things we do. I guess no one likes a mirror reflecting what big goms we are, right back at us in human form.

In any case, they caught my familiar nasally vowels and I joined them. It turned out they were all very interested in their Irish ancestry, and keen to see where they had come from.

“What about you, are you Irish?” one asked.

It’s hard to explain that I’m not far enough from my Irish ancestors to enjoy Ireland in a tourist way. I’m not Irish in a fun “let’s see which county our family came from and buy a framed picture of our family shield” way. It’s more in a “going to therapy because no one in your family can talk about things, ever” way.

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But there I was in a bar, minding everyone’s business but my own. Watching, judging, chatting with strangers. More Irish than I realised.