Much sentimental tosh has been written recently about Bewley's, usually by people who are the reason for it closing: they preferred to pay €15 for a cup of something with an exotic Italian name in an American-style outlet than the far lower price in Bewley's, writes Kevin Myers.
Hypocritically weeping at the funeral of the victim you helped kill is bit Italian-American too: Poser Nostra. I stand beside the grave, conscience unsullied: Bewley's is the only café I have ever regularly visited in my life, and as the coffin sinks beneath the clay, with it goes part of my heart.
At least the history of Bewley's disposes of the socialist myth of workers' control. In a fit of pathological generosity, Patrick Bewley handed the company over to the employees, who promptly did what workers usually do when given the chance. They gave themselves extra holidays, cut working hours, increased wages, sold assets, including Patrick's beloved farm, until soon the till was empty - and they started howling for help. In strode the heroic Patrick Campbell, with swags of money, which he has scattered all over the place: to no avail.
I was in Bewley's in Grafton Street the other day, and I could see why it was doomed. It's hard to make sense of the architectural layout - little floors here and there, staircases this way and that - and harder still to rendezvous with anyone in this warren of little eating and queuing areas. It would take more money than selling coffee and sausages could possibly generate to reconstruct the building - and reconstructed it must be.
Like an elderly patient with gangrene, death is already under way. Bewley's no longer sells its defining almond bun. That I will never taste one again, smeared with a humble half-pound of butter, is like telling me I will never enter Lansdowne Road again. The almond bun was part of being Irish. Gone now, gone forever: it should be given a state funeral to Glasnevin, its coffin borne on the swaying shoulders of six grieving coffee urns; and at its graveside - beside Parnell's, of course - the Army will have a firing party equipped with Hechler and Koch .223 automatic buns. A meringue plays The Last Toast, with some uncontrollable wails in Bengali from the Darjeeling tea, which is probably contemplating popping into the crematorium for a bit of suttee.
In my time I must have eaten an entire sty of Bewley's bangers - sausages in sandwiches, sausages with chips, and best of all, sausages with mash and fried egg. Farewell, dear friend! Lay it away on the hillside, along with the brave and the bold, inscribe its name in the hall of flame, in letters of purest gold.
That Bewley's is much changed is painfully obvious. The term "tea-bag", for example, was once outlawed: at its very mention, the family ceased to be Quakers and became really quite Alabaman. One dark day, when a party of Americans asked for the illegal object, 16 corpses were soon hanging from Grafton Street lamp-posts. Fires burnt that night, and Bewleys in white hoods stalked the streets, cackling.
Those days are long gone. My teapot the other day contained a tea-bag, which I regard in the same light as the Pope regards Durex. In the sales area, the vast majority of the tea is in the form of these porous condoms. I scattered holy water around the place in horror, for the triumph of the tea-bag in Bewley's is a national tragedy, not quite on a par with the Famine, but certainly matching the Civil War. Yet, rather like finding one's wheelchair-bound grandmother as the nude star-turn in a pole-dancing club, I could not quite look away. I was appalled - yet there was a grisly fascination in seeing the impossible. Which is more repulsively mesmerising - your granny astride the pole, her wheelchair tucked under her arm, and the source of all those subsequent generations there for everyone to contemplate, or tea-bags on Bewley's shelves? Hard to say.
Almost nobody under 35 has the least idea of what a refuge and a reassurance Bewley's once was. On Saturday mornings, you could be sure of knowing a dozen people. It was the place which gave you the comforting sensation that, amid the smell of coffee and the hiss of steam, you were not alone; there was always somebody to bore you do death with his theories about how Michael Collins had been shot by a pregnant Kitty Kiernan, or that Eamon de Valera was descended from Brian Boru (on his father's side) and that Éamon Ó Cuív is therefore the rightful High King of Ireland - theories that, if not accepted, could end in buns for two and coffee for one at the memorial arch in Stephen's Green.
Where will one go to be bored now? Where will one find the massed company that is sober, eccentric, deranged or obsessional? And where will those funny old Bewleteers in strange woolly hats go? They have been roosting in the nooks and crannies of all the Bewley's cafés since Algernon or Marmaduke or Percival Bewley cracked his first bean in 1542. They order a cup of coffee at one minute past opening and are just finishing it as the lights are dimmed and the concluding brush of the day sweeps the last detritus from around their feet, having been unflinchingly resistant to every entreaty to make further purchases all day.
Which lucky café will now get such desirable business, as Bewley's hospitable lights finally go out in that fine place for all time?