Shane MacGowan’s legacy is the right to choose how to be Irish

A great diaspora artist, the Pogues singer gave the London Irish the right to shape their own story

As I walked from the office to the Northern Line station on the bitterly cold Thursday evening, the day we learned Shane MacGowan had died, I could hear a homeless busker playing Fairytale Of New York on a tin whistle.

This, one felt, was a bit much. But in the Irish London that MacGowan created, it made perfect sense. Of course the right song is being played at the right time, by a down and out who of course just happens to be a wonderful musician.

It was churlish to even question it.

Like any diaspora, the London Irish have stories, physical and mental maps, commonalities and dividing lines.

The Irish, first generation, second generation, or further back, are found all over London, all over Britain. But London Irish culture can probably be located, very roughly, in a strip across the north of the city. You could draw a circle around a diameter line between pubs (there will be pubs in this article) from the Auld Shilelagh in Stoke Newington to the Claddagh Ring in Hendon, and call that Irish London. Archway, Camden Town, Kilburn, Cricklewood... these are the places that grew to be at the heart of a diaspora culture over the course of the 20th century.

The signs (literal and otherwise) are there, if you look for them: Irish regional papers on sale at a station kiosk; a small Irish section in the supermarket, selling Jacob’s biscuits, Chef sauces, and Irish Cadbury’s chocolate bars (which, we insist, are better than the British version). Pubs that show Gaelic games on television and sell Lucozade behind the bar. At one north London bar, up until about a decade ago, the first prize for Sunday night karaoke was advertised as a return flight “home”.  No one ever had to ask where home was.

On a weekend, on Hampstead Heath or Wormwood Scrubs, you might see small groups with hurleys and sliotars, clearing out their hangovers with some fresh air and the satisfaction of a cleanly pucked ball.

On a Sunday morning in Spring, take the Central Line west to Ruislip and you might see a young man in a green and blue tracksuit, making his way to represent county London against vastly better resourced teams from “home” in the football or hurling leagues. In a traffic jam, you might see a cement lorry festooned proudly liveried in red and white, boasting of the company’s provenance in “London and west Cork”.

You might see a funeral cortege, coffin draped in the colours of Mayo (green and red) or Tipperary (blue and gold).

For the London Irish, authenticity can seem important. I think of a woman in a bar with a thick London accent proudly showing a friend and me the tattoo on her arm - a map of Ireland with her father’s village in Longford pinpointed; the taxi driver who in the length of time it takes to drive from Euston to Holloway Road (where he was born) had managed to give us his family history back to and including the 1916 rising; the pub landlady who, during Covid restrictions, ran me through the Three Big Questions (“Where you from?” How long are you over?” Do you go back much?”) before guiding me to my seat to watch the Leinster hurling final.

But at the same time, we play games. We can play Irishness up or down according to circumstance, according to audience - according to how different we want to feel.

This was MacGowan’s genius. The best of the Pogues’ songs can be read two ways. They can be morose and indulgent or self aware, depending on how you want to take them. The ubiquitous Fairytale is tragic and funny, because you know these people are kidding themselves.

A Pair Of Brown Eyes is both a drunkenly sentimental song and a song about being drunkenly sentimental.

A Man You Don’t Meet Every Day - neither written nor sung by MacGowan, could be the quintessential Pogues song. An old music hall number, it’s absurd, delusionally boastful lyric - “I have acres of land/I have men at command/I have always a shilling to spare... So come fill up your glasses/Of brandy and wine/ Whatever it costs, I will pay” - takes a surreal turn “Well, I took out my dog/ And him I did shoot/ All down in the county Kildare” - before returning to the refrain “So be easy and free/ When you're drinking with me/ I'm a man you don't meet every day.”

It is, of course, sung by a woman, Pogues bassist Cait O’Riordan.

This is the priceless self-awareness that separates the Pogues from the “Celtic Punk” groups such as the Dropkick Murphys or Black 47 that surfaced in the United States in their wake. And it’s the same having-your-cake-and-eating-it approach seen in the work of novelist Patrick McCabe and playwright and director Martin McDonagh. McDonagh’s Banshees of Inisherin was subject to a backlash by some critics in Ireland, a lot of which contained the heavy coding that Londoner McDonagh didn’t have the right to play with Irish literary and cultural stereotypes as he has throughout his career. Essayist Mark O’Connell noted that for McDonagh, “being an “Irish writer” might be a kind of choice, in the same way that it is a choice to work in a particular genre, such as crime or sci-fi, or Oscar-worthy drama.”

Inadvertently, perhaps, O’Connell had hit on something fundamental to diaspora experience - and particularly to diaspora experience in global cities such as London or New York. A diasporic artist - a diasporic anyone, in truth - can make a choice about what their culture is, what parts they choose to play with, what they choose to discard, what they choose to distort.

MacGowan made his choice -  he would embrace the parts of Irishness that horrified the English establishment and mortified Irish bourgeois culture the most - the paradoxical combinations wildness and circumspection, irony and zealousness , fecklessness and toughness.

I talk to Irish friends in London now about our children. In many ways our experience of diaspora life is fundamentally different to that of the older men we occasionally squeeze onto a table with in the bars we don’t take our English friends to - Ryanair and WhatsApp have changed the nature of “leaving”.

We talk, often, about how Irish we want our children’s lives to be. Few of us are the type who will be packing them off to Irish dancing lessons, but we want them to know. We want them to experience Irishness, without experiencing the burden - a burden that we, in our 40s, may have been the last generation to know. We want them to have songs and sport and pride.

Mostly, we want them to have a choice. We want them to know that this is a culture that they can access, they can play with, they can enjoy.

That is MacGowan’s legacy to us, to them, to the Irish everywhere. A culture freed of rules, of legitimacy tests, of the stifling purity and sincerity that characterised official Irish cultural life right up to the Pogues first gigs. “This is ours,” said MacGowan, grabbing the songs, the instruments, the jigs and the reels, the books and the poems and the myths and the legends. “This is all ours, and we choose what we do with it.”