A SEASIDE pub known for serving the most southerly pint in Ireland and famous for its seafood fare has reopened after extensive renovation.

O’Sullivan’s Bar in Crookhaven was closed for four months for an upgrade but is back with a new seating area and an additional large window for stunning coastal views.

As part of the works, the 93-year-old pub on the Mizen Peninsula had the entire bar floor dug up along with a major reconstruction of the kitchen and storage area.

All of the vintage photos and foreign currency bank notes, many donated by regulars, were carefully taken down and put back in their exact spot with new ones added, says Linda O’Sullivan.

‘We wanted to keep the look and feel, the spirit of the place,’ said Linda.

‘We live upstairs and it’s our home so it was important to us to get this right. For Dermot and I, one of the most exciting parts was finding more old photographs to put up on the wall, along with some recent ones of our daughters. We know how lucky we are to have such a charming family bar that we all enjoy running.’

Among the photos are many of Dermot’s father, the late Billy O’Sullivan who passed away last year.

Billy has a section of the bar dedicated to him, with a table made from one of the beams from the storage room now named after Billy’s boat, KASY-B.

The other table carries the name Setanta in memory of Billy’s mother Angela who brought a boat of the same name into the family as part of her dowry when moving from Long Island, Schull, to Crookhaven.

A large photo of Billy now sits on the bar and his favourite instrument is up on the wall, an accordion.

The business has been run by four generations of the O’Sullivan family since 1933. Sonny O’Sullivan and his wife Elizabeth O’Driscoll originally bought the building by the harbour, first serving food to local fishermen in the 1950s.

After decades of running it, in 1999 Billy O’Sullivan and his wife Angela handed the pub over to their son Dermot who runs it with his wife Linda and daughters Katie and Alex.

Most recently the pub scooped the Cork Gastro Pub of the Year title at the Irish Restaurant Awards.