O ne evening in early 2013, Aidan Mullally found himself nervously hovering outside the Foggy Dew pub in Dublin city centre. After “a bad Christmas” overshadowed by grief, Mullally had taken to Google in search of a sense of community. He stumbled across Dining Out, a social club for gay men that meets regularly in the capital’s restaurants.
“They were in the Foggy Dew. I was standing outside the pub afraid to go in. Somebody went out for a smoke, spotted the lost soul and brought me in by the hand,” he recalls of his first event with the group, laughing.
“I was a very very introverted person back then.” Mullally, who works in the Civil Service, now forms part of Dining Out’s committee, having taken charge of the club’s social media presence two years ago.
Sitting around a table upstairs in MJ Wright’s Eating Rooms on South Great George’s Street with him are fellow committee members Rory Ruane, John H Pickering, Alan O’Sullivan and David Langan. They are preparing to welcome 30 men for dinner in the restaurant, where the group can choose from a menu specifically curated by head chef Adrian Dragoman, who has had stints in Luna and Chapter One.
“It doesn’t happen so much now but occasionally we’ll get a phone call saying, ‘I’m outside and I don’t want to walk in on my own’, and one of us will walk out,” says Ruane, the club’s chairman.
Annual membership of Dining Out is €20, but there is also an option to attend a meal as a guest for a fee of €5. As it prepares to celebrate its 25th anniversary in 2027, the club is nearing 500 members. Events are typically attended by between 15-50 people, Ruane says.
During his presidency, Michael D Higgins recognised the organisation for its voluntary commitment to gay men’s social wellbeing, with committee members invited to attend a garden party at Áras an Uachtaráin. For its 20th anniversary, Dining Out hoped to host former taoiseach Leo Varadkar, who had expressed his support for the group. Unfortunately Varadkar couldn’t make it to the gala dinner at Wynn’s Hotel, O’Sullivan says, but Gogglebox Ireland stars Dave Baxter and John Sullivan made a special appearance.
While the average age of the group’s members is around “mid-late 40s”, attendees range between 30 and 80.
“Some are farmers, people in the legal profession, shopkeepers, judges, clerical workers, journalists and so forth. It’s a good mix,” says Ruane. “So when people come to a meal it’s very easy for them to sit beside somebody different and get a conversation going.
“It also appeals to people who don’t really want to go to nightclubs or to pubs,” he adds.
“It wasn’t why we were set up but we found that a lot of people coming here were coming out, and in coming out they didn’t really want to go to the clubs or didn’t feel comfortable. It wasn’t our intention but we’ve sort of facilitated that.”
While not a dating club, there have been a few relationships and even marriages that started with Dining Out.
Across the road from MJ Wright’s Eating Rooms at the Hoxton Hotel, a crowd has gathered at the bar for some predinner drinks. Among them is Muiris O’Reilly and his husband, Fergus Finlayson. The pair “met indirectly” through the club 20 years ago. “He wasn’t there but the person who introduced us was,” says O’Reilly, who is from Wicklow.
O’Reilly had come to his first event at French wine bar and restaurant Le Cave a couple of years before as “a late bloomer”. “I met some people there that are here this evening. That’s a testam…