And it’s an Eiretale of New York which is enough to get the boys of the NYPD choir singing Galway Bay.
With the Tourism Ireland team getting an early Christmas gift in the form of a Best Destination in Europe award for the 12th year in a row.
Beating off heavyweight France, Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Croatia at the New York bash.
Subscribers to Travel Weekly Readers’ Choice who held their 23rd Awards in New York may not be aware or little care.
But the NYPD do not actually boast a choir.
Although they do have a Pipes and Drums band who played on the video.
And who mimed the words to the Mickey Mouse March because they didn’t know the lyrics to Galway Bay.
An Epic revision
You can only imagine Shane MacGowan took some artistic licence because boys of the NYPD Pipes and Drums band didn’t scan as well.
Of course, it’s a birthright of the Irish to lay claim to any number of truisms we now take for granted.
With St Patrick, actually a Welshman, the daddy of them all.
And it is in that rich tradition that Shane and Epic the Irish Emigration Museum have followed.
With the award-winning tourist attraction marking the Great Man’s passing two years ago by assembling their very own NYPD choir.
To sing Galway Bay, just before the bells on Christmas Day.
All on video as part of the They Gave the Walls a Talking exhibition to showcase the diaspora.
Which Shane of course did more to champion than most.
Singing Galway Bay
It was one-such Irish emigrant Dr Arthur Colahan, native of Fermanagh but reared in County Galway who wrote the much-loved song about the City of Tribes while living in Leicester.
While it was another Irish-American, Bing Crosby, whose mother Catherine Harrigan’s family hailed from County Cork who popularised the song.
Making Galway Bay at one point the biggest selling record of all time.
And you can’t get better Christmas cred than Bing and Shane a double act we’d have loved to have seen.
And we’ve even come up with the perfect collab… Eiretale of New York.
While Aer Lingus will fly you to the Big Apple with pre-clearance out of the Oul Country and we found a sample return flight from €566.76 for next month.
