“R Smyllie, the editor, was a man of chesteronian proportions, who presided over the saloon in the backroom of the Palace. If Smyllie (wedged in his chair, looking like stranded walrus, a large ball of malt in his chubby hand) even nodded at you – you had it made”.

Patrick Campbell the author who remembers “The Palace”, for at that time he worked for Smyllie while a journalist with the Irish Times. In his book “My Life and East Times” he refers to Smyllie as follows:

“I met Smyllie one evening in a pub at the other side of Westmoreland Street (Palace). It was his habit to surround himself so deeply with courtiers and acolytes that no one from the office could get near him” On the back wall of ‘Smyllie’s Room’ at the rear of the Palace a famous cartoon of Smyllie and the literati remains to this day, which was drawn by the New Zealand caricaturist Alan Reeve, and is entitled “Dublin Culture”. In it are all the famous faces who frequented the “Palace” such as Austin Clarke, Flann O’ Brien, the poet from the “stoney grey soil of Monaghan", Patrick Kavanagh.

In Anthony Cronin’s memoir ‘Dead as Doornails’ he refers to Kavanagh’s sojourns in the Palace.

“Kavanagh sat in the Palace Bar, the haunt of journalists and men of letters, and he listened for a while, entranced. Here at last for him was literary Dublin, in fact the inner circle of the world of letters, and it appeared for him for a while that he was part of it”.

Playright and novelist, Brinsley McNamara, Dev’s biographer M.J. MacMaine, Painter Sean O’ Sullivan. Cathal O’ Shannon, Chairman of the Labour Court, painter Harry Kernoff, whose paintings still hang on the wall and Alec Norman, the man who succeeded Smyllie as Editor of the Irish Times. The premises have also been frequented by such “latter day” notables as Benedict Kiely, Mary Lavin, Francis Stuart, Seamas Heaney and many scribes of the Independent Press and Times newspapers. Liam Aherne continues the family business to this day with his son Willy(the 3rd generation of the Aherne family) which was commenced by his father in 1946. It retains a strange collection of other day memorabilia, and while he is immensely pleased with the upsurge of modern day popularity, he smiles at the thoughts of the premises twenty years back when it was essentially a very traditional and conventional pub frequented by elderly gentlemen with long coats and hats.