VANCOUVER — Friday night, while watching the Olympics Opening Ceremony, a guy from Alberta wearing a Team Canada snow hat and red maple leaf T-shirt and drinking a Molson sang "O, Canada" in downtown Vancouver, but only after watching a group of Irish dancers entertain a crowd filled with people sipping Guinness.
While Canadians lucky enough to get a ticket attended the Opening Ceremony, about 750 people who weren't VIPs packed inside the recently erected pavilion at Irish House, which featured more bartenders than Ireland has Winter Olympians.
Geoff Green, the proud Albertan, figured he had found the best of both worlds -- a crowd of cheering Canadians, and the neighborhood-wrecking, beer-saturated, first-to-open-and-last-to-close Irish House.
"I just got here from Alberta, and everyone I met told me this is the place to be," Green said. "I've been here since 2 o'clock. All I know is the Irish know how to put on a good party."
Unless drinking Guinness by the fireplace counts, the Irish aren't known for excelling in winter sports. "Truthfully, people come here, order a Guinness, then ask, 'There's an Irish team?'" said Tania Richards, director of sales, marketing and promotions for the Granville Entertainment Group, which runs Irish House.
The Holland House is more famous, because the patrons tend to wear funny hats, sing funny songs and worship funny sports.
Leave it to the Irish, though, to be first to open the doors to their House at the Vancouver Olympics, and the first to offend the neighbors. "We quickly became the place to be," Richards said. "The neighbors don't like us very much. You pack 750 people in here, you're not going to stay very quiet."
The six Irish Olympians aren't expected to win any medals; the Irish House already has won lots of Canadian hearts. The pavilion, erected right by the Comfort Inn on Nelson Street in the city's entertainment district, also has welcomed visits from the Olympic Council of Ireland and been blessed by an archbishop.
