Mary and John Moriarty celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary with their daughters Ailish ( left) Niamh and Fiona. The family spent time at Tully Mill Restaurant, Florencecourt, County Fermanagh.

Moriartys look back on long career running Mary Lynch’s

For 35 years the iconic Mary Lynch’s pub at Coralstown, Mullingar, was steered through choppy waters by the dynamic duo, John and Mary Moriarty. As they hand over the reins to the new owners, they look back at the highs and lows which saw them lose their business in a fire and rebuild it bigger and better, the loss of a baby at birth, the coming of the new motorway and the boost it brought to business, as did the greenway, and they remember the many good friends they have made and fun they had along the way.

John is from Castlegregory in Kerry and Mary is a Dublin woman. John trained in hotel management here and in Geneva, Switzerland. Mary studied at the Cathal Brugha Street College.

The couple met when they were both working in the Breaffy House Hotel in Castlebar. From there John went to work in the Granville Hotel in Waterford before coming to Mullingar to take over as manager of the Greville Arms Hotel.

“Christy Maye was buying it and I was there a month or two before he arrived. He and I were a great team,” John recalls. At the time they were doing lots of large weddings every week. “We were flying!”

Meanwhile, he and Mary got married, in 1982, and Mary started working as catering officer with the HSE.

From the time he came to Mullingar, John had his “eye on” Mary Lynch’s and the day he and Mary got engaged he vowed: “We’ll buy that.”

“There was something about it, the location was great, on the old Dublin Road.”

When Mary Lynch passed away in 1985, they did buy it.

They bought it for a good price, but interest rates were 18% at the time and there was a lot of work to be done as there were no indoor toilets, no central heating, the sash windows wouldn’t open and were stuffed with socks.

Mary and John got to work and opened in June 1986, offering food and drinks.

Four years later, though, disaster struck when the building was destroyed in a fire. It started in the kitchen and the whole building went up in smoke. “You could stand in the basement and look straight up to the sky,” Mary remembers.

The couple were told that the insurance company would pay out if the building was reinstated. John and Mary then ran up against Westmeath County Council. The new road was being built and they were told it would run through the site of Mary Lynch’s. The matter ended up in the High Court, but the Moriartys won their case with costs and Mary Lynch’s was rebuilt.

The pub was out of action for 18 months, but fortunately, Mary was working and her parents, both country people, had moved from Dublin to Killucan. The couple and their young daughters, Niamh aged two and a half and new born, Fiona, moved in with Mary’s parents while their home and livelihood was being rebuilt. They had at that stage lost their baby at birth.

Looking back, John and Mary see the fire as “one of the best things that happened to us” in that they came back with a completely new building. They put in four bedrooms downstairs and started doing bed and breakfast.

One of the highlights of their career was when War of Attrition won the Cheltenham Gold Cup. “We had a mad day and it was just quietening down when Michael and Eddie O’Leary and their wives arrived in with the Cup,” John remembers. “He (Michael) said they decided to call to us because we were the first pub off the motorway in Westmeath and we said, thanks be to God for Exit 13,” Mary added.

John explained that he had been Michael O’Leary’s boss in the early 1980s when he was manager of the Greville Arms and Michael, a student at Trinity College, worked there part time. His parents paid for his education, but he had to earn his porter money, he told Mary at the time.

The building of the motorway brought business to Mary Lynch’s. “A crowd from Tyrone built it and they were a great bunch of lads,” John said. They stayed with Mary and John and had their breakfast, lunch and dinner there for nearly two years. The regulars bonded well with the northern lads who “fell in with everybody”.

By that time their third daughter, Ailish, had been born and Mary remembers how she would, as a toddler, elbow her way in among the Tyrone fellows and demand her dinner. As a result of changing northern Irish pounds for the lads, the Moriartys had saved a tidy sum by the time the lads left and on a visit to John’s aunt in Newry, they changed it into dollars and the five of them headed to Florida for a dream holiday.

“The new road and especially Exit 13 was the best thing Westmeath County Council ever did for us,” John declared. He said that it has boosted their business enormously.

Now their daughters are reared. Niamh studied pharmaceutical science engineering and represented Westmeath in the Rose of Tralee. Fiona followed in her mother’s footstep and studied at Cathal Brugha Street College and Ailish is studying fashion in London.

They are a close family and are in contact with each other almost daily.

John remembers when Niamh represented Westmeath at the Rose of Tralee in 2016 as “a great boost”. He had been ill and undergone surgery and chemotherapy for bowel cancer, which left him out of action for six months.

“Niamh being selected as the Westmeath Rose speeded up my recovery, but being ill speeded up my decision to retire – I just can’t handle the late nights any more,” John remarked.

John was a long standing member of the North Westmeath Vintners and served as chairman 2008-2018 – he was also on the National Executive Council of the VFI.

He and Mary are sad to be saying goodbye to a business they gave 35 years to, but they are happy to be staying in the area and are buying “a beautiful bungalow” nearby.

“We have become a part of the community in Coralstown and when we had the fire it was unbelievable the support we got from locals,” John said. They spoke of the late Kit Dunne and his family, who were great friends; of Owen Judge, a local bachelor whose wit and intelligence were fascinating; and of Joe Geraghty, another bachelor who would come in for lunch and to play cards in the evenings.

“It’s a nice way to make your living, you have the best of both worlds,” the two agreed.

They also enjoyed the trad sessions every second and fourth Saturday and were touched by the performance the trad musicians provided on their last night at Mary Lynch’s.

They wish the new owners every success and are confident that they can take Mary Lynch’s “to the next level”. They feel the pub has huge potential as the greenway develops and already, it is bringing lots of business with walkers and cyclists stopping off for a bite to eat or a night’s rest before continuing on their journey. “Cycling is the new golf, but its more inclusive,” Mary commented.

“They (the new owners) are on fire and have major plans for the place. We’ve done our bit and it is time to go to the next level. The pub has huge potential and they are into social media, another world, and they live off it,” John and Mary decree as they gracefully bow out of pub life.