In the pubs of Dublin, raising a farewell pin for Shane MacGowan

Christmas came early in Dublin this year, but too late for a beloved adopted son.

On the last evening of November, a wet Thursday, cars at the traffic lights during rush hour blared ‘The Fairy Tale of New York’ on a thousand radios. From the sidewalk you could hear drivers and passengers singing along: “The guys from the NYPD choir were still singing ‘Galway Bay,’ and the bells were ringing for Christmas Day.”

The song’s famed lyricist and co-writer, Shane MacGowan, the British-born frontman of the punk-folk band The Pogues, died earlier that day. Ireland – his greatest muse and ancestral home – was confronted with a death that had long been predicted, thanks to MacGowan’s well-known alcohol and drug addiction.

MacGowan would have been 66 had he lived to see his next birthday — on Christmas Day, the subject of “Fairytale of New York,” the Pogues’ biggest hit, in which an elderly Irish couple berates each other and comforts lives lost in a soured Big Apple.

On South William Street, in central Dublin, a group of young women dressed for a night out sang ‘Fairytale’ as they ran through the freezing rain to a nearby pub. Student nurses at St Vincent’s Hospital, from which MacGowan was discharged last week after a long final illness, said they had heard news of his death at work that morning.

“We all just started singing ‘Fairytale of New York,’ and we got really emotional,” said Eve McCormack, 22.

“He was fantastic,” said her friend Sophie McEvoy, 21. “We were hoping he would make it because Christmas is his birthday. But not this time, I think.”

Leah Barry, 37, a social worker, was having an aperitif near Grogan’s pub on Castle Street, one of the last remnants of an older, more bohemian Dublin. She became emotional as she talked about her favorite Pogues songs – “A Pair of Brown Eyes,” about a broken veteran of an unnamed war, and “Rainy Night in Soho,” a bruised and tender love song.

“I was with a group of Irish students going to America,” Barry remembers, “and on the way we bought a compilation album of Irish songs at Dublin airport. That’s how I fell in love with the Pogues. Every time I hear those songs I think of the five of us in the one bedroom in Montauk having a crazy summer.

Across the River Liffey, at the Cobblestone pub, a famous venue for traditional Irish musicians, an old-fashioned session was in full swing in the front bar: guitars, tin whistle, fiddles, uilleann bagpipes and bodhrán, a traditional goatskin drum . In the early 1980s, the Pogues crushed this genre with London-Irish swagger, undermining its piety with punk power and venom. To his old tropes and titles – ‘The Boys from the County Cork’, ‘The Boys from the County Mayo’, ‘The Boys from the County Armagh’ – MacGowan added his own variations, such as ‘The Boys from the County Hell’ , with lyrics that showed his scabrous humor and diaspora-wide vision.

Born in the county of Kent, near London, to Irish parents, MacGowan first encountered music through the city’s punk scene and subsequently found lifelong inspiration in the dark poetry of his ancestral homeland, and in particular the Irish diaspora in the United States. ‘Body of an American’, ‘Fairytale of New York’), Great Britain (‘Rainy Night in Soho’ and many more), Australia (a cover of ‘The Band Played Waltzing Matilda’) and even Mexico (‘A Pistol for Paddy Garcia”).

Far from being offended by MacGowan’s irreverence, most people in Ireland loved him for it.

On guitar during Thursday night’s traditional Cobblestone session was Colm O’Brien, a Dublin-born musician now living in Boston. “My own personal opinion is that we will not realize his genius until the next few decades,” O’Brien said. “He introduced people to Irish music who wouldn’t have heard it otherwise, even Irish people. People who were young and punk and wouldn’t have listened.”

Tomás Mulligan, the 33-year-old son of Cobblestone owner Tom Mulligan, said MacGowan had directly inspired his own musical project, a punk-folk collective called Ispíní na hÉireann (“Sausages of Ireland”).

“Every Irish traditional musician went through a phase when they were young, when their parents forced them to play the old music and then they rebelled,” says Mulligan. “But then they came back to it. It was the Pogues who took me there again.

As Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa wrote in ‘The Leopard’: ‘If we want things to remain as they are, everything will have to change.’ John Francis Flynn, a rising star of the Irish folk scene, expressed a similar thought while enjoying a drink in the back of the Cobblestone.

“Most good traditional artists have two things in common,” Flynn said: “a real respect for the source material, but also an urge to do something new with it.” MacGowan had “opened a door to Irish music for people who might have thought it would be two”, he added.

“What traditional songs do is they’re almost like a time machine,” Flynn said. “You can connect with people who have long since disappeared, and with history.”

MacGowan’s work “was romantic, but it was real and honest. It wasn’t easy,” he added. “And sometimes it was brutal.”