High Above Their Shining Weapons Flew Their Own Beloved Green: The Celtic South

Ireland, a love letter in two parts.

This morning on the harbor when I said goodbye to you
I remembered how I swore that I’d come back to you one day
And as the sunset came to greet the evening on the hill
I told you I always loved you, I always did, I always will
  Shane MacGowan, "The Body of an American"

There was once a bar in New York City. No, not a bar. A pub, maybe? But no, that’s not the proper word either. A boozer, a doggery, a shebeen. There is a Molly’s Shebeen in the collapsing luxury-good nightmare of Gotham, stubbornly holding an eroding beachhead on 2^nd Avenue. But it’s not Molly’s, a great little boozer though it be. And founded by actual Irishmen: not the latest silly “concept” from a PE-backed purveyor of slop.

The place I have in mind is different. I could not even tell you how to get there. It was decades ago, before 9/11 even, that I raised my last glass and staggered forth -- “drunk to hell I left the place,” if I may quote the great Shane MacGowan, the patron saint of what some future biographer ma…